


Ashmé

by Pandora



Category: Star Wars - All Media Types
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-01-24
Updated: 2012-01-24
Packaged: 2017-10-30 01:35:12
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 55,829
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/326307
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Pandora/pseuds/Pandora
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Queen Apailana's only surviving handmaiden tells her story.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Ashmé

We had just finished helping the Queen with her wardrobe when we heard the news. I can still remember it perfectly: she was wearing her black throne gown, the one with cobweb lace cuffs, and firebug lights blinking on the skirts. I had just set the matching headdress into place, while she held her breath. It wasn’t the color of mourning, but now that I think of it, if this were only a story I made up, I would have said it was. The Queen was almost, thoughtfully, smiling. The scar of remembrance on her lower lip was just smudged, but she hadn’t looked into the mirror to see.

It was her second gown of the day, and it wasn’t new. She had worn it before when she met with a Governor from the northern continent. I will say that was several months before, and it will be true enough. The lace was made in Galla, one of the port cities by the Northern Sea, and he would notice that. That was, as I had learned to remember, the sort of thing a monarch must know.

There was nothing special about that day.

But then, a day only becomes special, and too glaring-bright to think about directly, months and even years later. I think the Queen’s windows were glowing with pale sunlight. It was the second month of winter, and though it hadn’t been warm, in Theed, at least, it never became truly cold.

Not that we ever noticed that. The weather was always (I can’t think of another word) perfect on Naboo—or at least, in the places I knew. It was never too warm, or too freezing, burning cold. It was calm. I wouldn’t learn until years later what it was like, actually, truly like, to be cold. It took me by surprise when I started to shake with long, furry shivers, my teeth shaking tighttight together. I hunched in my dark coat, made for evenings at the opera and walks in the park, the only coat I owned. The other passengers on the refugee ship noticed and laughed.

But I couldn’t imagine that yet. No, I was helping the Queen prepare for a meeting in the throne room. A routine meeting, nothing—that word again—special.

There was a knock at the door.

Queen Apailana started, her eyebrows raised in a question. The meeting wasn’t for at least another fifteen minutes. She looked over at me, and I was ready for whatever she said. I was her eldest handmaiden, and I think, even now, she trusted me the most.

“Go see who it is,” she said. She spoke in her usual low, almost boycracking voice, and she only sounded clumsy for an instant. “It has to be about the meeting.”

“Yes, Your Highness,” I said.

Now that I can only remember that day, I can admit that I was puzzled. I am not an emotional person, but I was nervous, my head buzzing with white static, as though I already knew what was wrong. My face was a porcelain mask as I went over to the door. I felt my mouth twitch into place.

I couldn’t imagine who would be there. Governor Strand, who had succeeded Sio Bibble only several months before, wouldn’t have dared. Captain Bibble didn’t need to knock. But when I opened the door, it was Sorbia Mabriee, the Minister of Education. She stared at me for several long, nervous seconds. She was perhaps fifty years old, with heavy black hair, her eyebrows picked and styled into musical note calligraphy. She was locked into a ryoo-purple watersilk frock, and wore too much face powder. It was unusual for women her age to still be in politics, and of course, she had never married.

Finally, she gave me a tight smile. “I need to speak with Her Highness.”

“Can it wait?” I said.

“It can’t,” she said. Her hands fluttered in front of her, too fast and moth-winged beating. “I would not be here if that were the case.”

The hallway behind her seemed to burn with light from the window. I know, even though I couldn’t see it then, that there was a new statue out there, a small moon-stone goddess, or queen, in armor, with a small hunting knife in her hand. Sorsché liked it. I looked back at Lady Mabriee, and my face was calm and yes, bored. Indifferent. I knew that, because I had practiced that look in a mirror, back when I was training. But my heart jerked and twitched, because I knew she was right. And I hadn’t forgotten that there was a reason to be worried. To be afraid.

Then: “Come in,” the Queen said.

She came up to join me, flanked by Caité and Sorsché. They wore the pale, spring blossom dresses I had chosen to complement the Queen, with tiny, silver sleek blasters strapped to their thighs where no one would imagine them. I could feel the one I wore. They had their hoods up, thought anyone who looked, really looked, would have seen their faces. Lady Mabriee did not look. 

“Your Highness,” she said. “I’m afraid I am here with some bad news. Inquisitor Mevath has returned. He will be in Theed within the hour.”

“I see,” said the Queen. “Then I shall have to meet him.”

She used her most royal, throbbing voice. She hadn’t sounded like a little girl for several years, and she didn’t sound like the stiff, droid recording voice Amidala had used in my childhood memories. No: Apailana was always, even when she tried not to be, human.

“Of course, Your Highness,” said Lady Mabriee. “We will see you in the throne room, and-- Remember. He doesn’t like to wait.

We were all silent, but I knew the others had to be thinking what I was. The Inquisitor had been on Naboo only a month before. He had supposedly had business at the Emperor’s personal estate, but then he had come to Theed. I hadn’t been present when he met with, when he questioned, the Queen, and she never told us what he wanted. But I knew enough: that Governor Strand had cowered and (the guards whispered) nearly wet himself when one of the stormtroopers brought out a torturer droid. That after he left the palace, the Inquisitor had visited Amidala’s parents.

“Your Highness?” I said.

“I know what he wants to ask me,” she said. Her voice was a stiff, wound up doll’s voice, like that doll I had had when I was little, with real eyelashes, and a wig of soft, charcoal-black hair that a slum girl on one of the moons had sold. Of course, I hadn’t been little, and certainly hadn’t been innocent, for long. And my mother hadn’t approved of dolls. The Queen shook her head, too fast and jerking.

“This time,” she said. “I don’t know what will happen. I do know that he will be even less patient than he was last time. And—I’m not ready to die yet.”

“You aren’t going to die,” I said.

“You won’t,” Sorsché said. She clenched her hands, her little hands with mirror-polished nails, together. “Whatever happens, we will protect you.”

“I know you will,” she said. She looked at each of us as we stood around her, close in our whispering-quiet skirts and quiet breathing. The scar on her lip was fresh and bleeding-bright. “But I will die someday. Nothing can stop that.”

(And: I thought of Amidala arranged in her coffin, in her last bed, as the beasts pulled it to her grave. She had little white flowers arranged in the cloak of her hair, the common starbrights you can find in any garden or park in the city. But she was empty. I had seen my great-aunt and my grandfather after they died, and their eyes were staring and glass-blank and emptied, their yellowed teeth clenched in the final death snarl. Though of course, I hadn’t thought of them at the funeral, as the river whispered nearby, not gloomy or caring, as I walked next to the Queen behind the coffin.)

“Do you want to change, Your Highness?” I said.

“This will do,” she said. “I’m not going to make a better impression on the Inquisitor in another frock. He knows our traditions, but he doesn’t have much respect for them. That must be why the Emperor sends him.”

The Queen sat down on the stool in front of her vanity. Caité and I went over to stand guard behind her. Silently, easily, because there was nothing else we could do. The Queen looked out the window at the sunlit, emptied sky, and I looked out with her. Her eyes were dark and blank, and though I can imagine, I can’t know what she was thinking. She was sixteen years old then. I would have been nineteen.

\--

When I was a handmaiden, my name was Brisaé. It means broken in an old Grizmalti dialect. I didn’t know that when I chose the name, and it was my mother who told me. She said that it was also the word, in several ancient languages, for blood. I decided not to think much about that. It was, for me, only a name. Really, I didn’t know why my mother needed to tell me it had any sort of meaning. I had chosen it because one of Queen Theodosia’s handmaidens was called Brisaé. I had found her name mentioned once, and quickly in passing, in a royal record diary when I was in school.

Today, my name is Ashmé.

I don’t need to say why, when I left Naboo, I chose that name. Queen Apailana was dead. The other handmaidens, whose names I will record here—Caité, Sorsché, Aimeé, and Esteé—were dead with her. I saw Sorsché. She had fallen onto her side, and her eyes were still staring and made of glass, for diamonds, and mirrors.

She was shot with several burnt-black holes, and her skin was already a dream-faded grey (like my grandfather when I watched his funeral boat float past us down the river. My mother had said, _It’s only a body. It isn’t your grandfather anymore. His consciousness is gone_.) She wasn’t, after only moments, real anymore.

They are all dead. And I alone survived, for years, until today, when I sat down and started on this story, though I’m not sure I quite know how. My mother fancied herself as a writer, a poet, but I didn’t. And I still don’t. Maybe it’s only that yesterday, I turned thirty. I have never thought much about my appearance, but I have been more vain lately. I wonder, or obsess, if perhaps, just perhaps, my breasts are sagging. Or if my nose is getting bony and sharp and mean.

(Brisaé, the handmaiden, would shake her head. How foolish! she would say, easily and with contempt. She knew, when she thought of it, that she was pretty, but it didn’t mean much to her. She was the eldest. The most trustworthy and good.)

(Meanwhile, I glare at my breasts in the mirror in my bedroom, the stupid sleepy pink nipples, and decide they have to still be perky. This isn’t Naboo. I’m still young, and--fine, yes--I am foolish.)

I have been writing at the desk in the main room of my flat, by the window that looks out on the community field at the end of the village. The shaggy grass is sticky with mud and footprints, and several minutes ago, I saw several deer grazing there. It doesn’t look that different from a village on Naboo, which I know now, if I didn’t know when I left, I won’t see again. But it is different. Quite different. And I keep looking up at my reflection floating in the glass.

My hair is loose, like a young girl’s. But then, while I’m not a girl anymore, I’m hardly a matron either. My mouth (my plump, and you could say, never kissed mouth) is chapped, and I have a cracked sore at the corner. I feel it gasp whenever I open my mouth. But the glass blurs it enough so I don’t have to see it, and I’m relieved. Yes, I’ll write here, know here, I am foolish.

\--

The Inquisitor was waiting in the throne room when the Queen arrived. He stood, he towered, he loomed, over by the windows. I can still admit I found it difficult to look at him. Most people (I had heard, through vague, whispered gossip) did. He wore a long, dragging black cloak, and his pale brown hair was long and badly and raggedly cut, though he had tied back in a neat tail. His nose was bird-beaked sharp, and (when he turned to look at us, with a cold, bored glare) I saw he had one ghost-pale eye, almost white, and almost blue, while the other was brown. The ghost eye was blank. The other was not.

“Hullo, Your Highness,” he said. “Thank you for not making me wait.”

He did not look past her at Caité or me, and I tried to see, to know, everything in the room. The throne, with the blasters hidden inside panels in the arms. I hoped, though only abstractly, we wouldn’t have to need them. Three stormtroopers, in their polished white arm, stood by the doors. That was good—it meant he didn’t plan on an arrest. Their blasters were still, and at ease, _at least for now_.

The Queen’s breath jerked out, and I could only hope the Inquisitor was not far away to have noticed. Caité must have thought the same, though I could not risk looking over at her to know. I had to watch the Queen. Finally, she twitched her mouth into a tiny, door-lock smile. She had planned to be in the throne room, waiting in state, when the Inquisitor arrived. That was why we were there twenty minutes early.

The Inquisitor had been earlier still.

“What do you want, Inquisitor Mevath?” the Queen said in her frozen, stone goddess voice; it was her only advantage now. It had no effect on him. He just watched her as she walked towards him, in a slow, gliding walk. We were her shadows behind her. “I know you’re not here for a pleasant social call.”

“How right you are,” he said. “Your Highness, you know exactly why I am here. We haven’t found the Jedi you have kept hidden so kindly—yet. And yes, there are Jedi here even now. You know as well as I do this is more than a rumor.”

“I have nothing more to tell you than I did before,” she said.

“Oh, there was plenty you did not tell me before,” he said.

He walked towards the Queen. He stalked towards her. But I could tell he was amused, at least, and perhaps only, for that moment. “But that can wait. Your Highness, must I remind you? The Jedi are the enemy of the Empire. The Empire you serve as you did the Republic, even if the government here hasn’t managed to acknowledge that.”

“Naboo is a democracy,” said the Queen. “Regardless of what you choose to call the government on Coruscant-- Oh, excuse me. I meant _Imperial Center_.”

“That’s correct. Imperial Center,” said the Inquisitor. He paused as the doors opened, and a stormtrooper came in. Governor Strand and a group of the advisors, including Lady Mabriee, came in after him. Their eyes had a frightened, wild animal gleam. Governor Strand did try to look composed, but his mouth still shook. He had spent his entire life on Naboo, only going as far as one of the moons during the Clone Wars. He had spent the Trade Federation invasion, I think, in a small city in the southern archipelago. He had only known peace. He couldn’t have been prepared for this.

“Imperial Center,” said the Inquisitor. “I’m glad to see you remember that much. You’ve certainly had the time to adapt to certain changes.”

He stopped, far too close to the Queen, and (yes, we noticed) to us. I could smell the just cleaned wool of his cloak. I looked at his glossy black boots. The Inquisitor, I thought in an odd, far away voice, had fairly small feet. His hands. He wore only one ring on his left hand, with a tiny blood ruby. I had to make myself look away.

“Your Highness,” he said. “The Empire has more important matters than this planet at the moment, for which you should be grateful.”

“We are grateful,” she said.

“Good.” Then, after another long, deliberate pause, he leaned in towards the Queen, close enough to kiss her, close enough for her to feel his breath. My legs clenched wooden tight and stiff with fear. It had to be fear. I could smell him, and _feel_ him. There was too much spit in my mouth, and I think, now, he heard me swallow. Caité’s cloak whispered as she moved closer to me, and to the Queen’s back.

The Inquisitor was still talking: “My men are searching the area around the palace even now. I do hope the Jedi have managed to get out of whatever hole you had them hiding in. Because, well, I’m sure I don’t need to explain any further.”

“Are you threatening me?” she said.

He almost smiled at that. “Not yet.”

He turned to one of the stormtroopers. I hadn’t heard him—and yes, inside that white armor, and that mask with its holoscreen black eyes, he was human—come up. He stood at attention until the Inquisitor spoke.

“Secure the room,” the Inquisitor said. “If you find any of the—Jedi scum, right?—Her Highness needs to see them brought in. Though I don’t expect this will be the last of it. Oh, these Naboo. They serve the same government they always have. But this girl doesn’t want to realize that only the name has been changed.”

“Yes, sir,” said the stormtrooper.

The Queen did not step back from the Inquisitor. She looked back at him, and I won’t even try to guess now, years later, what she thought. The Queen was tall enough, but she was fragile-thin, with teacup wrists and barely swollen breasts. But she had to ignore that, and face him down. She had to be beyond, and incapable of, emotion. It was the advisers who were appalled, who gasped, and protested.

“This is an outrage!”

“The Emperor can’t have possibly condoned this!”

“You can’t do this!” That was Governor Strand.

“You know quite well that I can,” said the Inquisitor, in a light, almost flirting, indifferent voice. “You shouldn’t whine like that, Governor. Considering that Lord Vader could be here instead of I, and he is not known for his kindness.”

They all became silent after that.

“Now.” The Inquisitor smiled at the Queen, and I remember thinking that he shouldn’t have done that, and he shouldn’t have looked so normal. It was (and I can’t think of another word to use here) wrong. “There is no need to get outraged. No one is going to make you sign a treaty today. And while you might be able to intimidate your Advisors, it won’t work with me. I am not impressed by arrogant little girls.”

“Queen Amidala would never have stood for this,” she said.

“But Amidala is dead,” he said. He stepped away, finally, and went back over towards the windows. The Queen waited only a moment before she went to sit down. We stood in our positions at her side. She didn’t have to tell us, because we knew—there was no point in resisting him, at least, not now. I could feel my blaster against my thigh, cold and bumping like a little girl’s, or little boy’s, fist. The advisors stood together in a huddle. The stormtroopers stood at the door. Their eyes were facing the Queen.

And: That was when the Inquisitor looked past the Queen, and saw me. Me. I startled, and hoped he couldn’t see who I was inside my hood. But even then, I couldn’t believe that. His mouth gave a slight, shivered twitch. He knew who I was.

I didn’t resemble the Queen, but then, only Esteé, who was trained to be her decoy, really did. He couldn’t see my honey-brown hair, which was halfway down my back then, since it was stuffed up in a tight chignon. Only my pale face, and my dark eyebrows. He looked. I looked back. I blinked, and finally, I looked away. But I had seen his milky-blue eye, and the sweetheart brown hunting one. I was suddenly cold, and the hairs on my arms were stiff and bristling like straw.

But I realized something I didn’t want to know. I was, and maybe I had been the entire time, almost exited. I had needed him to see me. I wanted to be afraid.

\--

He knew Esteé, the decoy, had stayed back in the Queen’s rooms. He knew she could hide inside one of the Queen’s gowns and her white face, and he knew she never had. Apailana had never had reason to use the decoy trick Amidala had favored. He knew we all wore blasters under our pretty, expensive, pale skirts. He knew.

\--

That night, Aimee brushed out the Queen’s hair the way she always did. The Queen sat at her vanity, with one flower light on, reading something on her personal datapad while Aimee worked. Her hair was sleek and heavy and went down, even without her hairpieces, to her knees. The Queen wore a faded, dirtysnow white lounging dress with glittering mirror embroidery, and though it wasn’t late, she was free for the night. The windows were full of black, cold night. The Queen’s quarters faced one of the private gardens, and I could hear the tree branches shaking in the wind.

These were not, I should add here, the same rooms Amidala had used. Jamillia lived in those rooms when she was queen, but Apailana had—for reasons she never mentioned, at least to me—not. She had moved into the quarters that King Veruna had used, in another part of the private wing, and had them redecorated. She had a big, swan white sleigh bed, and the rest of the rooms were in the plain Kadari coast style.

The Queen gave an irritated, cat twitch. Aimeé had hit a fist-tight knot. The Queen’s hair tended to tangle. I admit I have the same problem.

Aimeé took out the brush. “I’m sorry, Your Highness.”

“No need,” said the Queen. “I was only a little—preoccupied.”

It felt like an ordinary night, after another, ordinary day. But it wasn’t. We didn’t talk, gossiping about things I can’t remember now, as we usually did. The Queen’s main suite doors were locked, and Captain Bibble had doubled the guards who were stationed there. And (though not even the guards were to know): Sorsché was stationed in a hidden alcove down the hall. If the guards missed an intruder during their rounds, she would not.

Aimeé went back to her work, watching over the Queen in that way she had. We didn’t wear our cloaks in the Queen’s rooms, and she wore a blue linen dress, and her hair was done up in a single, plain braid. Aimeé was only six months my junior; she was darker than the Queen with somber, even tragic, black eyes, though she wasn’t any of that. She was the one who always managed to appear mysteriously content. She always went to bed early, and sank down into sleep, her eyelids smooth and calm with it. Caité was in the Queen’s wardrobe, where she made the occasional bird-winged rustling. Esteé was in her room. She was free for the evening, and did not have to ask why.

I sat in a bone-stiff backed wing chair nearby, one that I think came from the Queen’s childhood house, reading an issue of a linguistics magazine on my datapad. I have to admit I wasn’t too interested, but it gave me something to do.

The Queen smiled at me, and I made my mouth twitch back. Aimee nodded at me. We hadn’t wanted to speak about what had happened that day. I didn’t even know how to think about what could have happened.

The Inquisitor had left only several hours before. His men had searched the palace, and most of the royal district, but the Jedi—if there had even been any—were gone. First Caité, and then me, and finally Esteé. And: I tried not to imagine the moment when the two stormtroopers had come into that room, and found her. They had to drag her out. I had seen them bringing her down the hallway to the room the Inquisitor was using. She must have had fingerprint bruises on her arms later. Before the door shut behind her, I saw: Her teeth were clenched tight and silently together.

Only I had heard the whisper-growl in her throat. Esteé was from Apailana’s native city. The Queen did not play favorites, but I knew, even then, that she told Esteé things the rest of us would never know.

“Your Highness,” I said, and clicked the datapad shut. The fan turned off with a little, sleeping sigh. The Queen picked up the glass of sweetrose tea on her vanity table, and drank it so quickly she couldn’t have tasted it.

Caité came out of the wardrobe into the shadows at the other side of the room. Her skin had a moon glow, and her mouth breathed open in a question. Caité, I remember now, had a sharp face that made her look peeved and glaring, even when she wasn’t. She had heard the Queen’s voice, and she waited.

Aimeé waited. She took the brush, the teeth filled with a tangle of the Queen’s night-dark hair, and set it down. We knew what we had to say. We had discussed it after the Inquisitor had left, while the Queen made a quick holo-call to Senator Zevon on what I still thought of as Coruscant. She had only hade Sorsché with her during the transmission, and I had not asked either of them what they said.

Finally: “I mean no disrespect, Your Highness,” I said. “But I have to ask. Was there any truth in what the Inquisitor said. About the Jedi.”

The Queen sighed, and her voice had a slight buzzcrack when she said: “You know my official position. The Jedi no more killed Senator Amidala than I did. They saved us once, and if we can, we should return the favor.”

“I know,” I said.

And I did know. The Queen had never made it known publicly, but she had told Governor Bibble, and then Governor Strand, and the Advisors, that any Jedi who came seeking asylum could find it on Naboo. Now that this is only a story, I will admit I did not know what I thought, or felt, about that. Oh, I had nothing against the Jedi. I had never seen one, and I couldn’t remember the Trade Federation blockade. I would have been only three years old. But I didn’t want to die because of them. No, I did not want to die.

“I would like to be wrong, Your Highness,” I said. “But the Inquisitor kept hinting at something when he was questioning me. As if he wanted me to tell him what he already knew. I know you have offered asylum to the Jedi. But I don’t know, and I think I need to, if you have actually given it to them.”

Caité, with her cat-pointed face and needle sharp fingers, looked down at the floor. Her hair was loose and bristling with static fuzz. I don’t know why I remember that.

“I wish I could tell you, Brisaé,” said the Queen. “But there are some things I must keep from you, for your own protection. There may be a time when Inquisitor Mevath, or someone much like him, will torture you to get that information--”

“I would never tell,” said Aimeé. She looked at me, and then at Caité. Her voice hadn’t changed, but she had an earnest, glaring, desperate look. “None of us would. Your Highness, we would die before that happened.”

“Yes,” I heard my voice say.

“Yes,” Caité’s voice echoed.

The Queen looked sad. But then she gave a long, slinking stretch, and closed her datapad, and stood up. Aimeé stepped back, her skirts hissing over the bright floor. She waited. I waited. My mouth tasted sour, and I thought (I told myself, as though it were only a story, even though I can’t control now, as I make into words) _He’s gone_.

Whatever happened next, for now, he was gone.

“I know, Aimeé.” The Queen pushed her hair aside, and her fingers gave a slight, jerking tremble, but she hid it well enough. She picked up the datapad, and then it back down, the words still closed inside, on her vanity. When she spoke again, her voice was serious in a way I didn’t understand. Alas, I understand it now.

“But I cannot ask that of you. I’ve heard that Inquisitor Mevath knows how to break people, and I believe it. You don’t know what would say under torture. You don’t know when you would break, and what you would do it make it all end.”

\--

Several stormtroopers took me to the Inquisitor for questioning. Their heels clicked around me as we went down the hallway to the room he was using, in an older part of the palace I knew, though not well. My hands were stiff as though they were made from fan bones. And: I wasn’t in my cloak. The Inquisitor had insisted on that. The stormtroopers didn’t see a shadow. No, they saw me. I wore a dark blue, night blue gown that went with our red cloaks, and the skirts brushed against my thighs. I made myself look only ahead as I walked. I didn’t want to be afraid, and yes, I knew what that meant.

The stormtroopers stopped at his door, and the first one tapped. His voice turned on with a speeder-key hiss and: “She’s here, sir.”

Then he looked back. “Come with me.”

My thighs were shivering and numbed as I went into the room. The stormtrooper shut the door behind us. I don’t need to add, though I shall, that they had searched me before we left the royal wing, and taken my blaster. I had only used it during training, when I had let off wild, awkward shots I had decided did not count. But now that I might actually need it, I had nothing.

The room was a parlour, with stuffed plump, matching pinks chairs, and a floral maze print carpet over the ancient, dark wooden floors. The Queen had used it several times for private meetings with Yarm, the Princess of Theed, and once, Senator Zevon. I looked around in a quick, nervous blur, but I didn’t see any torture druids.

The Inquisitor had been working on his datapad. He had taken his cloak off, and hung it over the back of one of those pink chairs. But he looked up when we came in, and for a few, endless moments, he just watched us. He wore a magnifying eyepiece over his ghost eye. Later, I would know that he was mostly blind in that eye. But then, it seemed to watch me with an annoyed, wild wulf glare.

“Good,” he said to the stormtrooper. “You may wait outside the door.”

After the stormtrooper left, he looked back at me. The door was clicked shut again, and we were alone. “You’re Brisaé?”

His voice was indifferent. I couldn’t believe, now, that he had seen me in the throne room. I must have imagined it. My heartbeat wobbled, and I couldn’t breathe, I couldn’t think, as he came towards me. He was looking at me now—or again--and I don’t know how I didn’t turn my face away. I wanted to turn pale, invisible, into the air. ( _A handmaiden is only her mistress’s shadow_ , Captain Bibble would recite.) And: he had said my name. He knew--well, of course he would know--what it was.

“Well?”

“Yes,” I said.

“Brisaé,” (and my name sounded hard and dark, as though it was the name used for a species of small, rarely seen forest-cats, when he said it, and he had to say again). “Do you know why you’re here?”

If he had to ask me, then perhaps I didn’t. I took a shaking, endless breath. “You want to know about the—the Jedi the Queen is supposed to be hiding.”

“That’s part of it,” he said. “I’ll be blunt. I won’t assume the Queen shares everything with you, but I know you are her confident. You’re a good Naboo girl, and that is why you are what you are. And that is why you should know that, whatever she has told you, you have another duty, to tell the Empire—to tell me—what I need to know. And if not now? I can be patient, and I will wait.”

“I don’t have anything to tell you,” I said. (My voice sounded cold and far away, and thank goodness, thank something, it wasn’t afraid). “And even if I did, I can’t.”

“You can,” he said. He was only a foot away from me. “You have chosen not to, out of admirable, yet misguided loyalty.”

The curtains on the towering windows were opened, but the room seemed suddenly too shadowed-dark. He hadn’t moved. I looked away from his face, and down at his blood-ruby ring. His fingernails were long and just slightly dirty.

“Sit down,” he said.

“But--”

“We’re not in a hurry here, Brisaé,” he said. “I had that other girl in here for over an hour, so I’m sure you would like to be comfortable.”

He watched me as I did what he wanted. I almost dropped down into the wooden writing chair the Inquisitor had been using the moment before I saw him. The back was bony and stiff as a door behind me. I couldn’t look away from the Inquisitor as he came and loomed over me. He smelled like wool and his dark cologne aftershave. My tongue was too heavy. I could hear him breathing, and I could see my tiny, blurred reflection in his eyepiece. My pulse was ticktickticking. And:

“You needn’t be afraid,” he said. “I didn’t have to bring the droids with me today. Another time, I might have to. I think you know what that means.”

_He knows how to break people_.

“What do you want to know?” I said.

“You tell me. My men haven’t found the Jedi we tracked to Theed, but if they’re still here, they will. I see I need to explain this again, Brisaé. Your mistress is on a path she should not have chosen. You will go down with her. Is that what you want?” 

My hands had clenched up into fists. “If I must. You must already know that my loyalty is first, and always, to the Queen. I wouldn’t have been chosen otherwise.”

“Of that, I am well aware,” he said.

He smiled. This time, he was amused. Then he leaned in and took my arm, and before I could think, he pulled me to my feet again. My mouth was gasped open, but I couldn’t speak. I had nothing to speak, and (he wants me to be disoriented, I knew. He has the advantage when I cower and shiver away from him). He watched me for several cold, glaring seconds. I watched his pale eye behind the eyepiece, with its huge, lopsided pupil. His dark eye looked back at me, and only at me.

“I’m not interested in your absolute, thoughtless loyalty,” he said. “I heard enough about that from the other girl. Either you will save yourself, or you won’t. It’s not quite as simple as that, but I think you can understand that much.”

He took me over to the pink velvet sopha, still holding my arm with a strangely, or not strangely, light, gentle grip, and dropped me onto it. I straightened my skirts, and he sat next down next to me. He didn’t touch me again. One of the stormtroopers’ voice hissed just outside the door. The Inquisitor sighed.

“You expected me to ask you about the Jedi,” he said. “So tell me. Have you seen any of these traitors to the Empire? The Empire your Queen serves?”

“No!” I said, my voice a loud, blaster shot. “I don’t know anything about the Jedi. I haven’t seen any. There aren’t any Jedi.”

“There were,” he said. “I see you weren’t informed, Brisaé. We found signs of habitations in storage rooms in the basement levels of this palace, and in one of the major governmental buildings. Someone had been there, and only several days ago. Apparently the Queen didn’t think you needed to know that.”

“Why are you telling me this?” I said, finally, if too late, calm.

“You should know what you’re going to die for, don’t you think?” He picked his datapad off the tea table, and snapped it open (like a woman’s legs, I think now.) I pressed my thighs tight and clenched together. I could still feel where he had held my arm, and as I watched him open a file of bright, lightning colored words, I could imagine his hand on my thigh, pushing up my skirts, and-- Silly, stupid, foolish, and wrong.

He set it back down into place, and looked out towards the gleaming windows. The datapad started a light, ant clicking. Then:

“There was a girl,” he said. “Let’s say she was about nineteen years old. She had grown up hoping to one day serve the Queen who ruled her world. And she got what she wanted. This girl was trained to watch, and hear, and know everything around her. She was hidden inside her cloak, so no one else saw her. She was silent, and she thought she was clever. And I won’t deny that she was. But she made a mistake. She didn’t realize, she never even thought, that others might know what she did. That she might meet someone who could watch and see everything, including her--”

\--

He was done with me perhaps an hour later. I couldn’t tell how long it had been, how long I had been sitting with him on that pink sopha. A tree’s shadow swayed over the floor, and minutes before, the windows had lit up with candysweet light. The Inquisitor asked me about all the Queen’s movements and meetings over the past month, and wanted details I knew, and ones I couldn’t remember. He didn’t explain himself, and after a while, I wondered if anything I told him mattered.

He did not touch me again.

I should include that. He didn’t touch me, and then, he didn’t have a reason to. My back was stiff, and I kept my legs crossed tight under my skirts. The Inquisitor stopped to tap in a flash of words in his datapad several times. He only nodded when I didn’t tell him anything he wanted to hear. And: I knew he wanted something.

I didn’t know, though I would later, when I was alone inside my room, that I had wanted something as well. And _he had given it to me_.

Finally, one of the stormtroopers came in. “Sir?”

“I’m done with her for now,” said the Inquisitor. “She doesn’t know anything, or at least, she doesn’t today.”

He looked back at me: “You may leave now, Brisaé. Go.”

I moved my head in a jerking, stiff nod, from habit, and stood up. He was writing something else in his datapad, something I didn’t want to read and know. I was stickydamp between my legs, not from arousal, but from nerves, and something so eager, so naïve, I don’t think it should have a name. I didn’t look back as I walked over to join the stormtrooper. I noticed then, suddenly and oddly, that his armor was the color of little girls’ holiday shoes. Like the shoes I had to wear, and had loathed, when I was eight, since they were a present from my paternal grandmother. I never have looked good in white.

“Follow me, miss,” said the stormtrooper’s voice.

“Yes,” I said.

I heard the Inquisitor stand up behind us. And then, right before the door closed, his voice as he said: “Bring me the decoy.”

\--

Esteé never told us what happened to her in that room; or at least, she would never tell me. I do remember hearing her little, whispered voice, once, as she spoke with the Queen behind the closed bedchamber door. I understand that. We had all decided, during our first week in service, that Esteé was the Queen’s best friend, bosom companion, and kindred spirit, though I wonder now if that was only because she was the decoy. Esteé was the youngest, five months older than the Queen.

I should say that she looked just like the Queen, like her reflection in a mirror, but she didn’t. When you looked, and I did, she looked like her sister, but not her twin.

I have to think to remember what she did look like. Esteé had long, dark hair, like the Queen, and light brown skin. She was maybe a little lighter than the Queen, but she looked the same the few times she wore the Queen’s white powdered face. After the first, year she grew several inches taller than the Queen. It seemed to embarrass her, and she started to lower her shoulders into a stoop.

The Queen did catch up to her, and Captain Bibble only made one comment, and that one in passing. I don’t know what he thought of the decoy plan. I do suspect, as I write away at this, that he might have put into use eventually.

Years ago, I would have said we were friends. Now? I know that I never knew her well enough for that.

I will admit it: I don’t know how to write about Esteé. All the words I’ve tried are sloppy and clumsy, and it isn’t as though I’m a writer, or that I ever pretended I was one. She is the only girl, or woman, I worked with as a handmaiden who blurs away when I try to think of her. Even now, I can’t see her.

\--

Of course, Moff Panaka heard about the Inquisitor’s visit. He did not come to Theed in person, but he did make a holo appearance. His image flickered with static, and the Queen stared, solemn and earnest, back at him. She sat on her throne, while her advisors perched on a group of chairs below her. She wore, I recall, a grey gown with a rustling purple underskirt and complicated snowtrack embroidery that had been done by hand, and not by droids. She wore the elaborate, pink feather headdress Aimeé had selected. It would have represented something, but I no longer remember what it was.

I sat on the chair in front of the pillar to her left, watching her. Sorsché and Caité were on her right side. I don’t remember what we wore, but I will say we wore the red velvet cloaks, the ones Caité and I wore at Amidala’s funeral. The Royal Guards were at their stations in various points around the room.

The advisors were whispering together. Lady Mabriee was there, and Lord Jain, the Minister of Defense, and Lady Qade, the Minister of Music. I don’t know why she was there. Governor Strand gave them a stern look, but the Queen didn’t bother to see them.

“My sources tell me Inquisitor Mevath left Naboo for Coruscant yesterday evening,” said Moff Panaka’s imagine. “But he will come back, Your Highness.”

“Then let him come back,” she said.

“Your Highness,” said Moff Panaka, in his slowest, most patient voice. He knew how to, as the Inquisitor would put it, deal with _arrogant little girls_. “I will continue to do what I can to protect you. But this—this rebellion, this refusal to make even minor changes to our governmental offices. The Empire won’t overlook this for much longer. You have to decide if this is a fight you want to choose.”

“I already have,” said the Queen. “Moff Panaka, the Republic may have been turned into this Empire, but we are still a democracy. We haven’t changed.”

“Maybe it’s time that we did,” said Moff Panaka.

“I refuse to believe that,” she said.

Governor Strand interrupted. “We admire your idealism, Your Highness. But it’s a virtue old men like myself can no longer afford. We have to change. If we don’t, the Emperor will do more than merely alter the name on our buildings.”

“He’s right, Your Highness,” said Moff Panaka. “The Republic is gone, and nothing will change that. And if we wish to survive, we have to adapt. Now, I won’t go into the rumors I’ve heard about the Jedi you are supposedly sheltering. I will only say this: We need to protect ourselves. I have no wish to go down with the Jedi.”

The Queen glared at his image, but only for an instant before her white doll face, with its matching, fevered red dots, was controlled again. “Moff Panaka. No one here knows better than you what the Jedi did for us. How can you even say that?”

“I’m a realist,” said Moff Panaka. (And now that I remember this: did he sigh with regret, or even sadness? The holo image blurred his face too much for me to tell.) “I have to be, Your Highness. We can’t save them. But we can still save ourselves.”

The Queen was silent for another moment, and then: “That is all, Moff Panaka. I thank you for your concern.”

His image snapped off, and the Queen moved to her feet. She squeezed her eyes shut, and we were there, right behind her. The Advisors were all whispering-hissing voices and rustling skirts. I ignored them. They were not my concern, and the Queen was. They bowed, and Governor Strand nodded, as she went past. She looked back at us, and in that flash, I saw her eyes were damp and swollen. Her mouth tightened. She might have wanted to cry, but she wouldn’t. She would not show anything at all.

\--

And? I would like to write now that after that, nothing happened. It isn’t true, but I wish--and oh I do wish--that I could make it that way. There was a story, I would write, about a Queen. She was threatened by corrupt men, but she knew how to play their game. She changed the names on her government buildings, but not what happened inside. The Empire was placated enough to leave her, to leave us, alone. There weren’t any Jedi hiding in Theed, with their wide, scared, and patient underground eyes. The Empire didn’t find anything, because there was nothing to find. Nothing.

Or this: The Queen rode into battle at the head of an army made up of men and women and Gungans. Her armor shone with sunlight, and her hair whipped behind her in two long, long braids. She had a mirror-silver blaster on her side.

Her eyes were night black, and determined. Relentless. She had learned to know what all heroines do.

She brought down an Imperial army, and protected, and saved, Naboo. And I was the girl who rode at her side, armed with my own blaster. Isn’t that how a proper story should go, must go, will go?

She lived happily ever after. She lived. That is what I should write here, even though it won’t make it true. She lived. And so did I.

\--

Several months later, an Imperial Intelligence agent, a plain man in glossy, polished black boots, came to the palace with three stormtroopers. He had been sent by the Inquisitor. When they left, they took Esteé with them. I can still see how she walked out with them to their shuttle, her legs wooden stiff. Her heavy slumped hood fell over her face. Her white shoes, the white shoes we all wore that day, flashed under her skirts. One of the stormtroopers bumped her ahead with his blaster, and we could only watch.

Governor Strand stood next to the Queen. Her eyes were shocked wide open, but she never looked away. I was behind her with Aimeé and Caité. I pressed my feet against the pavement, and a wind brushed at my face.

The agent had explained that they were taking her to one of the Emperor’s mansions, a family estate he seldom used. I have imagined it as a dust-grey stone house off in the mountains, with a few clockwork servants to look after it. I can’t know how true that is, or isn’t, since I never had to see that place.

Or: _Inquisitor Mevath has some questions for her_ , he said. _Your Highness_.

They were gone, the shuttle roar already fading away. The wind snapped at my skirts, and when the Queen stepped back, we stepped back with her.

“Your Highness,” said Governor Strand. “I still can’t imagine what the Empire could possibly want with your handmaiden. It doesn’t make any sense.”

“I would like to agree with you,” she said in her droid-metal, regal voice. “But it does make sense. My handmaidens are not merely my ladies-in-waiting, and the Inquisitor is clever enough to have noticed that.”

“He’ll break her then,” said Governor Strand.

“We can only hope he does not,” said the Queen’s voice. And I wasn’t imagining it: her eyes were damp, and she blinked several hard, moth-winged times. She was using the voice because she needed it more than she ever had. I didn’t move, but I managed to get closer to her. My cloak smelled furry and warm, but when I swallowed, my spit was cold as just melted ice.

“We’d best go back inside,” said the Queen.

Governor Strand nodded. “Should we contact Moff Panaka?”

“No,” she said. “There isn’t anything more he or I can do at this point.” (She did not need to add that Moff Panaka would not be interested in this matter. That would only change when the Inquisitor dared to interrogate the Queen herself.)

Esteé returned three days later. That’s how I remember it, and no one is going to read this and tell me otherwise. She had been tortured. There weren’t any visible marks I could see, even when she was undressing. The Inquisitor and the Agent were too careful to allow that. Her breathing was shallow and tripped up several times, and even though she never ceased in her duties, she was tired and distracted.

When I spoke to her, she said (or at least, I will say she did, and it will be close enough): “You don’t have to worry about me. It’s nothing.”

She said: “I told him nothing. Nothing. That’s all that matters.”

After a week, and then a fortnight, she seemed better. Or perhaps she had only gotten better at hiding it. She was skittish when we were all in private, and I noticed once she seemed disgusted, as she got into another dress, just to touch her skin. She wouldn’t talk about that, or anything else. I thought then, and now I’m certain, that whatever they did to her in that ghost house damaged her heart. And I also know that she wouldn’t live long enough for it to matter.

\--

The Queen asked me to meet with her in her personal sitting room. She had twenty minutes free that afternoon, I remember, before her next meeting, the usual weekly discussion with Lady Qade and her senior assistant. The Queen was already there, standing at the window, when I arrived, looking down at one of the small rose gardens, though the bushes were only full of sharp, lion-clawed thorns. It was a small room with lakewater-green wallpaper, and it was one of the few places the Queen could be alone.

I let the old-fashioned, swinging door swish shut as quietly as I could. She knew I was there, but she didn’t turn. Caité and Esteé were just outside the door. Watching.

(And it occurs to me that they would have stood there, still and silent, until their legs and backs were stiff and heavy as stone walls. It happened to all of us during the endless, nattering meetings the Queen had with Governor Strand, Princess Yarm, and visiting Thanes and Duchesses. But we never complained, even in private. It’s only now that it’s years ago in the past that I wonder how we endured it sometimes.)

When the Queen turned, her face was glowing from the light behind her. She wore a black dress that glittered with beading, and it looked like one Amidala had worn, the image preserved in one of her official speeches.

And: Jamillia had worn a gown much like this one once, in a memory I had of her greeting my mother at a reception, when I was still a young, and _idealistic_ , girl. Her black hair has been filled with scattered moon-light pearls. The Queen wouldn’t have known that.

But I shook that off, and: “You wished to see me, Your Highness.”

“Yes, Brisaé,” she said. “I know I have that meeting with La Qade, but I hope this will be enough time. Please, sit down.”

I waited until she sat down on the creamy-pale plush sopha before I sat down across from her in a pale yellow chair. It wasn’t like the Queen’s usual taste, but it was left in one of the storage rooms from a queen, or king, who had been dead for hundreds of years, and I think she was oddly fond of it. I crossed my legs at the ankle, like a lady (and last week, someone called me milady, a title I certainly don’t want), but I did let my hood down. The Queen knew my face, and: I knew hers.

“What do you want to tell me, Your Highness?” I said.

She paused. “I’m going to have to be more honest than I should dare, even here. But I trust you, Brisaé, and I hope I won’t regret this. Now, I don’t need to tell you about the difficulties I’ve had with the Empire.”

We hadn’t discussed that in over a month. But then, though the Queen had not implemented any of the changes Governor Strand had, only days before, with a desperate, shivering smile, suggested she consider, the Inquisitor had not returned to Theed. Nor had any other Imperial agents. There were still rumors about hidden Jedi, but people had started to ignore them. We were relieved. We had been fortunate.

We never mentioned what had happened to Esteé. Perhaps that was what she wanted, but I don’t know. Really, I only realize now how little I knew her.

“My intelligence just informed me that Inquisitor Mevath is back on Coruscant,” she said. “They don’t think he will be assigned off-world in the near future.”

I nodded. The Inquisitor had stayed on at the Emperor’s estate for a week after Esteé returned to the palace. I had (as I waited to fall asleep in my shadow-dark room) thought about him. I wondered what might happen if I saw him again. I wanted to feel that same relentless, yet utterly and horribly exciting fear. But whatever reasons he had for remaining on Naboo, he didn’t need to come to Theed. Moff Panaka had met with him, but he told the Queen they had only discussed several sector affairs.

“They couldn’t tell me more than that, and that is a problem,” she said. “I cannot discover how the Empire might act against us here. I need someone on Coruscant. Someone who can find out who our enemies are, and what they have planned.”

“Senator Zevon is on Coruscant,” I said.

“True,” she said. “But—I wouldn’t want to drag Araminta into all this. She doesn’t know much more than I do.”

I nodded. I had met Senator Araminta Zevon only several times, but enough to remember her. She had been the Princess of Theed, once upon a time, and that was partly why the Queen appointed her to replace Amidala. She and the Queen were on amicable, if not friendly, terms. She was in her mid twenties, with thin, pale skin, and a dramatic swan honking voice. That had made her a whispered joke when she was Princess of Theed.

Now, she sat on several minor, and appropriate, subcommittees. She attended meetings with other senators where they talked and did not act. She kept a low profile (which must have made Moff Panaka nod grimly and silently with relief) and if she was not popular, or well-loved, she did not cause trouble. She never said anything the Senate did not wish to hear, the way Amidala would have.

And: I am sure she was never able to forget it.

“Do you have anyone in mind?” I said. “You could send someone in the Governor’s office. He should probably visit Coruscant as it is.”

“I do,” she said. “Brisaé. You are my most trusted handmaiden, and that is why I chose to tell you this. I wouldn’t wish to burden any of the others. I can only send someone I know--without any doubts--has my interests. Who will see what I need to see. I want you, if you are willing, to do this. To go to Coruscant for me.”

I only looked at her for the next few minutes, and it was so quiet I could hear Caité and Esteé moving around outside. Then: “I don’t know what to say.”

“Of course, this is your decision,” the Queen said. “I would never force you into anything you feel you cannot do.”

She folded her hands together in her lap, and another second clicked away.

“You already know what my answer is,” I said. “I would do anything for you. (That was what I was supposed to say, as though I were reading lines from a play. But the rest was up to me.) “But—I’m not trained in intelligence, Your Highness. I want to do this for you, but I don’t know if I can. I am only a handmaiden.”

“And you know exactly what that means,” said the Queen. “Think of it. You know enough to see the truth, and I can trust you to tell me. But, in any event, you will not be a handmaiden for this journey. Senator Araminta will think you are one of my senior aides. It’s close enough to the truth that it won’t be a deception.”

I decided to nod. “We haven’t much time before you meet with Lady Qade. How are we going to go about this?”

“I will inform the Senator later today that I’ve decided to send a representative to the capital. I have only been there once since I was elected, so she should approve. She may also make assumptions about my intentions, but you will know that better when you see her in person. We’ll have to work on the rest of the details tonight.”

Someone made a light taptap at the door, and the Queen turned. Her face shifted for a minute, and then she was serious again. “Yes?”

“Lady Qade is waiting for you in the Sun Room,” said Sorsché’s voice. “Shall I tell her you are on your way down?”

“I’ll only be a minute,” said the Queen.

Caité opened the door a crack, and I could see the blur of her face in her hood. The Queen rose, and I got up with her. I put my hood back up. Soon, I would be her shadow as she went down to the Sun Room. Nothing else had happened, _yet_.

“Is there anything else, Your Highness?” I said.

“Yes. Senator Araminta may believe I have come to Coruscant myself in disguise, while Esteé stays here as my decoy. Amidala liked that sort of trick. I never have, but the Senator doesn’t believe that. Of course, I will tell her your name, but she may still expect, when you meet, that your name is Ashmé.”

Yes, Ashmé. Before I chose it as my new name, before Apailana was Queen, and Princess of Theed, when she was still a girl, that was her name. I hadn’t known her then, but Senator Zevon had just long enough to remember. Ashmé.

\--

Several nights before I was to leave for Coruscant, I walked through one of the old, seldom used hallways of the palace, not far from the exit that led to the labyrinth of basement tunnels that went down to the river. I looked around as I walked, though I didn’t expect to hear or see anything I didn’t know. I wasn’t ordinarily on the night watch, but I had needed something, anything, to do. I was about to shake out of my body with my constant nervous energy in my room, or the Queen’s room. Captain Bibble might not have understood or approved, but he had still put me in the roster before he left for the day.

And it did help as I went through one hallway, and then turned down another. The palace echoed with quiet, and occasional pale silver moonlight. Finally, I was alone, and calm enough to think, about all sorts of things I didn’t know how to talk about.

And: I didn’t have to see Esteé, who had had a bad day. She had cowered in a huddled, clenched ball in a corner of her room for hours, even after the Queen’s personal physician gave her a large, black-glass pill.

I turned down a new hallway, into an old, old part of the palace that had built during the time of King Jafan. The moon-stone floors were dusty, and the shadows were so dark I could almost touch them. A guard’s voice buzzed on his comm. above me. I tried to think about my approaching trip. It would be my first, and (I still thought) only trip off planet. My father had made a business trip to Chommell Minor during the Clone Wars, but he hadn’t told me much about it, and I hadn’t asked. I had always assumed, without having to think about it, that I would spend my life on Naboo.

But (I thought, as the corridor widened out, and I saw the dim, drowned shape of a staircase ahead in the gloom) I would manage it. I had to do what the Queen wanted, even if I was nervous, or scared, or incompetent on that droid of a planet.

I’m not sure when I first heard it--a wind-faint, whispering sound, like someone’s voice and their nervous, barefooted footsteps. Then I stopped, and the darkness was as quiet as it had ever been. But I knew not to believe that now. I stood there, and yes, there was a skittering down the hallway in the darkness. My breathing pounded in my ears. But then, whoever it was, whatever it was, stopped.

I felt for my blaster under my skirts. It was bumped up hard and bony against my hand. The silence echoed. “Who’s there?” I said.

The only thing I could hear was my voice. But I saw the darkness shift, just enough to know that I had been right. I had my blaster out, and I clenched it hard enough that my hands couldn’t shake, and: “I know you’re there. Show yourself.”

_Show yourself_ , my echo sighed back.

I couldn’t see anything move, but then her voice came out of the darkness. “I didn’t know anyone was coming down here. Please. Don’t shoot.”

“I won’t,” I said. But I still clutched my blaster, even after I lowered it to my side, until it was sticky with my fingerprints. “I’m with the Queen’s security. I won’t hurt you, but you have to come out where I can see you.”

“Very well. It seems I haven’t any choice,” and a girl came out of the shadows. She blinked, even in the weak shaking light from the old overhead fixture, and her eyes were drowned black with pupil. She looked as though she were sixteen, though she could have been younger, or older. She wore an old brown robe, and her hair was hacked short and dyed a bright, ruby-glass red. She could see I was still holding my blaster, but if she was afraid, she only stood there and watched me. Her hands, I saw, were empty.

I managed to make my fingers relax around the blaster enough to push it back into its holster. She couldn’t have known, but I had it set to stun. “What are you doing here?”

“I can’t tell you that,” she said in a small, tiptoeing voice. “But don’t worry. We aren’t going to be here for much longer. I know these things.”

I walked towards her. Now that I could see her, I began to wonder who she was, and could only find one answer. She didn’t look different, or special, but I must have still thought _So it’s true. It was always true_. Someone whispered behind her in the darkness. I barely saw an old woman with glittering fish eyes holding a stuff plump satchel over her shoulder, and the little boy holding onto her hand, before they were gone, vanished and drowned in the dark.

“You’re Jedi,” I said. 

The girl looked back at me. I could see the bruised-dark veins in her bony, pale hands as she twisted them around. “It seems I won’t have to tell you after all. Yes, I was a Jedi. I’m not anything now, but that isn’t enough for the Empire.”

“I see,” I said. (And I did see: that it was all true, everything the Queen hadn’t wanted to tell me. That meant that I had believe at least some of what the Inquisitor had told me. His men had found the signs Jedi left behind. They were the secret he had wanted me to know, the story I hadn’t wanted to believe—until now, when I had to.)

“Then you know that your Queen let us hide here,” she said. “We only got here a few nights ago, but we’ve been hiding in other places for—a long time. I probably shouldn’t say anything more than that.”

“Yes, that would be best,” I said. I touched the blaster underneath my skirts, and the girl, the Jedi, only watched. “But I was wondering. I had my blaster trained on you only a few minutes ago. I couldn’t even see you, but you still knew. Then why didn’t you stop me with the Force? I don’t know very much about Jedi, but I know you can do that.”

“Most Jedi could,” she said. “But I’m not sure I can. I was never strong in the Force like the Jedi you must have heard about. I wasn’t clever, or brave, or cunning. I don’t know how I’ve managed to survive this long when everyone else is dead. Anyhow, I couldn’t risk using the Force. I know that won’t save me, but I have to try.”

“You should leave,” I said. “One of the other guards should be coming through here soon, and it would be best if he didn’t see you.”

“I know.” She bit down into her lower lip, and I noticed she had chewed a glowing candy-red sore there. Her skin had a pale glow, as though she were only a reflection inside the water of an old mirror. (I know: how poetic of me.) “But perhaps we’ll see each other again. The Queen might send you down to the right level in the next few days. I have the feeling no one else will question you about it.”

“How can you know that?” I said.

“Remember, I was a Jedi,” she said. “It could happen, but then, many things could happen. I suppose I’ll know soon enough.”

“I suppose,” I said to the girl, who I never would have a name for. She looked away, and tensed herself forward, ready to run and disappear. “Don’t worry. I won’t even tell the Queen I saw you here. It will only be my secret.”

Or: _When I wake in the morning, this will have all faded away into a dream I have trouble believing. I won’t even think to tell any of it to anyone_.

\--

Caité watched me while I packed the clothes I would wear on Coruscant. The Queen and I had planned out my entire wardrobe, and I was already dressed for my part of the Queen’s representative. I was a senior aide, which meant I could wear this dress, with its tight, classical stomacher and square, low neckline. It had faint, silvergleam embroidery on the heavy upper skirt. Aimee had done up my hair in an elaborate, braided style, and I had given my face a light, sugar soft powder. I had told myself, when I looked into the mirror in my room, that this was what people would see.

Yes: people would see me when they looked. I had been used to that only four years before, and I would get used to it again.

Caité looked down at her hands. She had them twisted around at her waist, and (I would imagine) her fingers were sticky and nervous. She had come to help me get ready, but we both knew she just needed a distraction.

Still, even though I could have done it myself, I said: “Caité, I think I will take that one black underslip. It should be in the back of my wardrobe.”

Her cloak rustled as she walked off, and soon enough, she was back with the slip and another limp, dark dress over her arm. “Her Highness suggested this one. You might not ever have a reason to wear it, but it’s best to be prepared.”

“Well, I will certainly be that,” I said.

Caité started arranged the clothes into a neat order inside the luggage. I only gave the new dress a quick look as I folded it together and set it down, but I did notice the fabric was fursleek and slippery. Mostly, I felt my shoes pinched and locked in my new shoes, which were black and (I had heard from Lady Qade) _the edge of fashion_. I supposed she was right, but I had just put them on hours before, and they were already chewing blisters into my heels. But I knew, when the blisters hissed with pain, and I walked with a stiff, mincing lurch, that they would go away soon enough. Most things do.

“I’m not certain this is a good idea,” Caité said, again. “Now, I know Her Highness has only the best of intentions. But I don’t know what she thinks you’ll be able to find out on Coruscant. I know you’re not trained in Intelligence.”

I shrugged. “I’ll figure it out when I get there, and meet with Senator Zevon. I do know people are always talking. I just have to go where I can hear it.”

“It’s not that I’m worried,” she said. “And we can manage while you’re gone, even if we have to bring in a girl from the training school. But—I’m sure you’ve noticed this, Brisaé. There’s something wrong with Esteé. Something very wrong.”

Esteé still went about most of her duties, and she had recovered physically from her interrogation. She had told us, and the Queen, that she was better. But she still preferred to stay and stand guard at the Queen’s rooms, and she could only sleep when she took the night-sky pills. She would cringe and cower at certain, sudden moments, and I had heard her talking to herself, in a hard, smacking voice. She wasn’t better.

While I tried to know what to say, I leaned over and arranged a tiny glass bottle of ryoo fragrance in the clothes. Finally: “I don’t know what to tell you. But I doubt Esteé is getting better. The Imperial agents broke her at that mansion.”

“Yes,” Caité said in a whisper. “You’re right. She told us they didn’t get anything out of her, but they let her go for a reason. That can’t help matters much.”

“I don’t know,” I said. “Perhaps she did talk, after a while, just to end it all. But I think it will only make matters worse if she knows we suspect that.”

“Brisaé,” the Queen said then, as she came into the room. She had a break for luncheon before she met with Governor Strand, and she had just taken a holo call with her younger sister in Kadara. Her face paint had faded, and she smiled. Aimeé was right behind her, with her hood down. Sorsché was stationed outside the doors. I don’t know where Esteé was, and I didn’t ask.

“I see you’re nearly done packing,” the Queen said. She gave the clothes a firm, slapping pat. “Good. Have you thought of anything else?”

“No, Your Highness,” I said, and Caité nodded. “We’ve got everything.”

“We certainly tried,” said the Queen (and she might have stopped and sighed). “I just hope there aren’t any surprises we can’t manage.”

She sat down on the edge of settee, and Aimeé stood behind her. I clicked the luggage shut, and then, before I thought about it, heaved it up onto its wheels. I had several smaller bags that went with it in the set that were ready in my bedroom. The Queen’s senior aide would not travel the way I would, because she—because I—had an image to maintain. I wouldn’t be carrying this luggage out myself. Several of the palace servants or the guards would take care of that, and I had to remember it.

“I’ve thought of that, Your Highness,” I said. “But I won’t know what those surprises might be until—I’m on Coruscant.”

“I know,” said the Queen.

Caité took the luggage handle and pulled it out of the room. I watched her cloak as she went through the doorway. Then I turned, and looked straight at my reflection inside the Queen’s vanity mirror. I startled, and saw my eyes widen. The Queen and Aimeé were only shadows behind me. I walked over to the mirror, and stared back at myself. My skin was moon pale against the dark, bruised-purple dress. My nipples were clenched-stiff against the bodice. I leaned closer to see the tiny, clockwork pulse twitch at my throat. My eyes were dark, and wide, and _bemused_.

I looked like, for the first time in several years, a woman, an attractive woman, with a flushed, slightly chapped mouth, and slinking, round hips. I wanted to touch my reflection, and I wanted to punch it. It glared, and I couldn’t look away, and I knew why. Because for that first instant, I hadn’t quite recognized myself.

\-- 

Before I left, I did see the Jedi again. They were in a small, but clean, room with a tiny refresher in one of the oldest, basement levels of the palace. The girl I had seen before opened the door before I could knock—she must have heard my stiff, careful footsteps. She had dyed her hair again, to a harsh deathbird-feather black, and arranged it with a hairpiece into a sloppy, fat chignon. I could only wonder who had given her the dye. She wore a eggshell blue matron’s dress, but she was still barefoot. The old woman and the little boy weren’t there, and I didn’t ask about them.

“So I was right.” She pressed her feet together, and her toenails were clean and had a faint, pearl gleam. “You had a reason to come here.”

Now I was surprised, and confused. “I thought you already knew that.”

She smiled. “I guessed, but I didn’t know. I was never that good.”

She walked back into the room, and I saw a narrow, tightly made bed, and a little table with a plate of white cheese and fat green apple slices. She picked up a piece of the cheese, and ate it with tiny, nervous bites, even though she looked hungry. Maybe she was only trying to be polite. Maybe she wanted to make it last. Maybe I was the one who was hungry, and twitching, and gasping with it, but _for what_?

“Did the Queen send you?” she said.

“She wanted me to check the security codes in this level. Of course, she couldn’t actually mention, well, any of this.”

“Of course,” the girl said in her faded voice. “But we’ll be gone soon.”

“Where are you going?” I said.

“I don’t know, and I couldn’t tell you even if I did. Old Ama still believes the Force will show us where to go. But it hasn’t told me anything.”

She sat down by the table (after she looked towards the door, and the hallway behind it, and then back at me) on an old wooden chair that must have come from the kitchens, one no one would need or notice was gone. She finished the cheese, and picked up an apple slice and sucked it to get the juice out. Her hands shook, but otherwise, she could have been a normal, village woman flushed from her mother’s wedding kiss.

“Do you need anything else?” I said.

She swallowed a bite of the apple. “No, this is enough. I’m going to try to pass as a young housewoman at my next stop. I don’t know if I’ll be lucky enough for it to work. I just don’t know—and I’m supposed to. Brisaé, is there something you believe in?”

“What do you mean?” I said.

“I don’t know. I’ve heard the Naboo have holymen, so maybe a deity, a god or a goddess of some sort. Something.”

I shook my head. “My parents are atheists, and that’s what they raised me to be. So I don’t believe in anything other than this world. That means when we die, we don’t exist anymore. Our selves, our consciousnesses, are gone.”

I expected her to be shocked, if she even believed me. Most people have been the few times I’ve had reason to mention I’m an atheist. They want to think that I’m a good girl, _a good woman_ , like them--and they believe. But she only nodded, as though she had actually heard what I had said. And I want to stop here at that moment, in that room with the girl I never saw again. I want to say that I couldn’t imagine yet what I would do on Coruscant, but it won’t be true. I have always, alas, known what I am.

“I was taught that after death, one becomes part of the Force,” she said. “But I never was good with abstract ideas. I wasn’t much of a Jedi.”

“I wouldn’t know what that means,” I said.

The next day, this room would be empty. The bed and the table and the chair would be put back into their previous places. If the girl had shed any hair, or dust from her skin, it would be cleaned away. The only sound in the room would be the glassy silence.

“My master did. She was always reminding me that I had much to learn, as if I didn’t know at least that much. But it turned out everyone did, including her. Lately—lately I keep thinking about the parts of the Jedi code she pounded into me. I certainly knew that well enough. Have you ever heard it?”

I must have shaken my head, obviously confused. “It keeps going, over and over again in my head, and I can’t stop it. _There is no passion, there is only serenity. There is no ignorance, there is only knowledge. There is no death, there is only the Force_.

\--

Senator Zevon was waiting for me on the landing platform. She watched as I walked towards her down the ramp. No, she didn’t look surprised—only, if anything, polite, and (slightly, deliberately) bored. The two guards with her with grimly, sternly silent. I looked straight at her, and at them, as I stepped down. I had to. The platform was floating out in the middle of the sky. My ears popped like party firecrackers when I swallowed. I couldn’t look at the buzzing, constant airtraffic, and I knew not to look down. I made myself give her a slight, quick smile.

Because: _Remember who she will think you are_.

The Senator nodded back. A wind rushed around us, beating my skirts up into a swollen balloon, but I pushed them down and tried to ignore it. The Senator hadn’t seemed to notice, so this had to be normal. My own guard was right behind me, and I could hear the hissed out static-buzz from his comm.

Even now, I don’t know to describe what I felt that day, those first few moments on Coruscant. The sky was a smooth, pale blue, and several fat, angel skin clouds floated over the tops of the nearest buildings, and it was warm enough. But it wasn’t what I thought of as pleasant. The air smelled stale and greasy from the speeder fumes. Already, I wondered why anyone would want to live there.

Senator Zevon came up to meet me. There was another woman behind her who I hadn’t noticed before. She made her eyes wide and earnest, and: “Hello, Miss Melor. It’s a pleasure to finally meet you. I trust you had a smooth trip?”

“It was acceptable, Milady,” I said, and looked over at the other woman I should have seen before. She wore a fashionable lavenderblue gown with a pinched tight waist, and her hair was done up in a style Aimeé would have approved of, and her mouth was a flushed, blushed red. But I could tell, from the way she stood, her hands folded neatly at her waist, that she had to be the Senator’s handmaiden. .

“Good,” the Senator said, and paused. “I should admit that I was--expecting someone else. The Queen can be sly. She told me you were coming, but I thought she might decide to send another girl, one she is quite close to. Ashmé.”

“No,” I said. (And yes, I was amused, though I didn’t make even the slightest smile. The Queen had been right.) “The Queen has never been interested in the sorts of disguises I’ve heard Amidala favored. If she had wanted to come here and see matters for herself, she would have told you.”

“One never knows.” Senator Zevon shrugged, while her handmaiden watched her with calm, shadowed eyes. I recognized that look very well. “The ways of a Queen can be mysterious indeed. She told me she was sending one of her senior aides, but I didn’t know what I could believe. Not until I had met you myself.”

“I understand,” I said.

Senator Zevon watched me with a cold, hard stare I had to make myself return. She had green eyes, actual pale, pastel green eyes, like a spunky, hair-tossing, rebelling girl in a holo girls’ drama. Her pupils were blaster shot black holes. Then she gave me a holoflash of a smile. I knew not to respond. My guard only coughed behind his hand.

“But, of course, I am always pleased to see a representative of the Queen,” Senator Zevon said. “Now. I have a little time available this afternoon, so we should go back to my apartment for drinks, and we can discuss—Well, you will have to tell me.”

“Of course, Milady,” I said.

Senator Zevon, Senator Araminta, had already turned and walked away, her handmaiden slipped into her place right behind her. Her skirts blew out around her in a breeze I could almost see hit her. I could only walk, or rather, hurry after them to the speeder waiting nearby. The handmaiden did see me then, but only for a moment, before she looked back to her mistress without any interest. I wasn’t a threat, but she must not have known what I was. I shook my head, the wind beating at my eyes.

\--

Senator Zevon’s apartment was in a fashionable part of the senate distract, in another one of the towering, lurching tall buildings with sunlight-glowing windows. But I only saw a flash of it as we approached, and then the speeder was landing on the Theed style marble balcony. I could see a sitting room with elegant, bone-pale furniture behind the opened doors. Senator Zevon could have used Amidala’s former apartments at Imperial 500, but she had chosen not. The Queen hadn’t asked her for her reasons before she put them up for sale. She didn’t have to. She would have understood.

It was cool inside by the balcony, and I could hear a faint, murmured sigh from the air circulators. A bright, brass art fountain was filled with constant gurgling, leaping water. The handmaiden cleared her throat just behind me. I had forgotten she was there, and that bothered me like a slight, crawling itch. I shouldn’t have.

“I loathe this building,” the Senator said, while I went over and looked into the fountain. My shadow fell over the water. “It isn’t so bad now, but the air dries up in the winter. I don’t know how I’ve endured it, but somehow, I have. But enough of that. Go and sit down. We should have our drinks any moment now.”

“Thank you,” I said, using the cold yet, always and of course, gracious voice one of my great-aunts had been so good at. I sat on one of the pale sophas that had obviously been imported from Naboo, and the Senator, and then her handmaiden, sat down across from me. I listened to myself breath, and tried to relax.

Another handmaiden came over with a tray of several glittering glasses full of something silk-slick and blue she set down on the sleek mirror-glass caf table. Her skirts sshed, and before I had seen her, she was gone.

The Senator picked up one of the glasses. “You should try this. I know you can’t find it on Naboo, because I’ve tried. It’s called a rosekiss--and no, I don’t know why.”

“Thank you,” I said. “I believe I shall.”

I did. The drink didn’t taste like perfume, which is how I imagine a rose would taste, but like limon syrup with a slight alcohol burn. I drank it in tiny, careful (and ladylike) sips. Senator Zevon watched me as she sipped at her own drink. I couldn’t tell, but then I never could, what she was thinking. She had her pale, peachy-cream blonde hair piled up in a wired copper headdress, the one that had just come back into fashion that month. She wore a ring with a tiny jet stone, the color of space, which clicked against her glass. Her fingernails were plain.

And I remembered, suddenly, seeing her in the swaying underwater dark at Amidala’s funeral. The Queen had already appointed her to the position in the Senate, though she was waiting a week to make the formal announcement. The people might grieve, but the system could not wait. She was walking behind us, and I had noticed once, that she almost smiled as she looked down. She might have only looked reassuring for the public, and she had barely known Amidala. She hadn’t any reason to weep.

“So,” said Senator Zevon. “Let’s talk.”

The handmaiden sat next to her, looking down at her lap. She didn’t have anything to drink. It doesn’t need to be said, and yet I will write it here despite that, that she had not been introduced. After all, _a handmaiden is the shadow of her mistress_.

But I wasn’t. I set my glass back down on the tray. “Yes. I assume the Queen has already spoken with you regarding the purpose of my visit.” 

“She has. I haven’t been able to get back to Naboo for a while, but I am aware of recent events. I understand Inquisitor Mevath visited the palace several times looking for those hidden Jedi I keep hearing about. You know, the ones hidden away with the wine in the best cellars in Theed. It is a little too—dramatic. Don’t you think?”

“I have heard the same rumors,” I said. (I wouldn’t think, at least not until I was alone, of how close the Inquisitor was, and certainly close enough to find me, and then I would run, my heart beating too fast, too eager and leaping, but I wouldn’t escape--) “But nothing came of them. The Inquisitor hasn’t found anything to use against the Queen. But the Queen still wishes to have a better understanding of her enemies, and she can’t do that on Naboo. That is why I am here.”

“She might have asked me,” said Senator Zevon. “Miss Melior, this is my arena. I do not interfere in hers, and I trust she has no reason to interfere here in mine. I am not certain what she wants from me.”

The glass bumped ice-melting cold in my hand as I had another sip. “Milady, let me explain. The Queen has no wish to interfere in your affairs, or to unduly involve you in hers. That is why she sent me to see for myself, and for her, what the situation is here.”

“Well, I don’t know what you’ll find,” said Senator Zevon. “There is always talk, but so far, not what I’ve been able to overhear it.”

“If I may ask, what is Naboo’s present status in the senate?” I said smoothly, and easily, and polite. I didn’t sound like anyone I recognized. My tongue was slick from the drink, but I was surprised to find I was beginning to like it.

“I’m afraid I’m going to disappoint you, Miss Melior,” Senator Zevon said, her voice too bright and hahaing. “Naboo is of little importance, if any, to the Senate. If the Empire is planning any action against us, they’ve kept quiet. I’m sure they are rumors, but there are always rumors, even if I haven’t heard them. And if I had? I sit on several useless subcommittees with senators who knew Amidala. The ones who didn’t, quite conveniently, disappear three years ago. They will never forget that I am only her replacement. And they will never trust me.”

She did not have to say: _Just as the Queen will never trust me_.

“You’ve told me why you came here. But I don’t think that’s all of it. You can tell the Queen, when she asks, that I am quite capable of filling my position. That Binks could manage it. And I don’t need one of her retainers to follow me around and make certain I’m well enough behaved.

“Milady,” I said, though I could see it wouldn’t be any use. My voice was too loud and flapping, and the handmaiden looked at me with a calm, serious expression she would have practiced in the mirror. I should know. “I think we have a misunderstanding. I am not here to spy on you. The Queen is not concerned with your performance, or with your personal life, and neither am I.”

“So you say,” she said. “But enough of that. You must want something to eat. I shall have Uma here see the droid about that.”

I nodded. “I would appreciate that, Milady.”

“Yes, Milady,” said the handmaiden. Uma.

Her voice was deep and had a slight scratchybuzz. She sounded amused, not demure and quiet as I had expected. I watched her as she stood and slipped out of the room, and: Her shoulders were slightly hunched down, so I wouldn’t see that she was taller than Senator Zevon. Oh, I could tell, because I was still taller than the Queen, and Captain Bibble worried, as he had for years, that someone, anyone, would notice. Yet she didn’t look awkward, the way I had always felt, and her hips swayed.

\--

The Queen had rented an apartment upstairs for me for the next three months, though we didn’t expect I would need it that long. I still remember the first time I walked through its cold, shadowed-dark rooms, the air circulators hissing in the ceilings. It was, I could still see, a nice apartment. The furniture was stiff and fresh from a ship hold, and there was a small balcony with a smooth, maize marble floor, in the same classical Theed style as the one Senator Zevon had. I stood in the middle of it, feeling the sky lurch underneath my feet, and looked at a blackwood statue by the doors of a young girl with drowned-shut eyes and tiny, fist-clenched breasts. Senator Zevon had picked that out.

The sky was a pale, bedsheet clean that far in the upper city, between the rows and rows of tower-tall buildings. The speeders moved past like lake insects.

I had gone there after my meeting with Senator Zevon, and waited, though I didn’t know what I was waiting for. I made a holo-call to the Queen, even though the Senator had already told I had arrived, and safely. Since I knew the connection worked, I called my older Erised. She lived in an isolated cabin near the mountain village where she was the one and only schoolteacher. (Yes, she could have had a nicer house, but Erised had the pious, and flagellating, sensibilities of a nun.) Her connection did work, but it was so bad I couldn’t get an image, and her voice was a static-snarl.

After I left the balcony, I wandered to the bedroom, and dropped down across the plump marriage night bed that still smelled like soap. I found my datapad in one of my smaller bags, and pulled up the novel Sorsché had sent me. She had been certain I would like it. But I couldn’t concentrate. The rows of tiny, sharpfanged black words slid together when I tried to read them, and finally I gave up. I might be interested in another time. The sky outside the window was full of glowing dragon eye speeder lights, and I watched them move for a few minutes. The constant fan hissing made me feel sleepy and dull.

The Senator had sent the second handmaiden up to my apartment earlier with a bottle of starfruit wine. I had a glass with dinner, and I had to admit, Senator Zevon had good taste. But then, if I only knew her by reputation, I would have expected that. Her aunt, Lady Chandra Zevon, was still know for having the best parties.

The hissing paused, and I gave my head a hard shake, as though that would make me think faster, and got up. I wasn’t going anywhere, so I had changed out of my elaborate, political dress, undone my hair, and put on my dressing gown. I had had it since my last year of school, and it was my favorite, probably because it was so garish. It was made of curtain blue brocade-silk, with embroidered cuffs with slightly frayed lace.

There was a knock at the door, and I went over to deal with it. “Yes?” I said, while the door slid open in front of me.

It was the other handmaiden, the one who had brought the wine. “Miss Melior? Senator Zevon sent me. She thought you might like some assistance with your toilet while you’re here, since we noticed you didn’t bring a girl.”

“That was very thoughtful of the Senator, but it shouldn’t be necessary,” I said. “I’m not a lady the way she is--” I stopped, and she only watched me, silently, patiently. She had calm, amber-brown eyes. “I’m used to looking after myself. Though I might need a little assistance with my hair in the mornings.”

“Of course,” she said. “My comm. number is 16-3909. You can call me if you need assistance for that, or any other reason. While you are here, you are our guest.”

“Thank you,” I said.

Before I could decide how to go about asking her inside, she had turned to leave. Her skirts flashed up over her pointed purple shoes, the sort of shoes a woman would wear to an all night costume ball held in a room with windows for walls. I stood there watching her neatly, primly done hair, and her pale neck, and before I knew it, I had said it: “But I don’t even know what your name is.”

She stopped and turned back, her eyes wide and girlishly startled with surprise. I had thought she was in her late twenties, but now she looked younger. She didn’t say anything, and I felt myself burn with a flush. I must have been lonelier than I thought in my empty apartment, with only my voice thinking in my head. I wasn’t used to being alone. It had sounded all right the moment before I said it, but I knew better. No one sees handmaidens, let alone knows their names.

“I’m sorry, Miss Melior,” she said, and that apology felt too familiar. “Of course, you will need to know that. I’m Oppelia.”

I nodded. She gave me a faint, flutter of a smile, and: “I don’t want to be rude, but I’m needed downstairs. The Senator just came in with one of her friends. And remember: if you need my help, you have my number. Goodnight, Miss Melior.”

“Goodnight,” I said, my voice fading into an echo.

The apartment was still cold and huge with silence. I clicked on the main light in the sitting room, and then snapped it back off. The lights from the windows were bright enough. I stared out at them for a minute as they moved through the smoke-blurred, dirty, purple sky. I hadn’t expected to see any stars, but I couldn’t even see a glimpse, and I tried, of any of Coruscant’s moons.

I went back to the bedroom, to the room that wasn’t mine yet. My hands were stiff with cold, and I pulled my sleeves down over them. I turned up the heating in my room, and woke up my datapad, and turned on the novel. I read several pages, but I wouldn’t remember any of it later. I was finally on Coruscant, on, yes, _Imperial Center_ , and I didn’t know what I was supposed to do. I wondered if the Queen had.

She must have suspected Senator Zevon would think I had been sent to spy on her. She had told me the Senator might make certain assumptions. She had. (And I could still see the stiff look on her face, and the twitch of her eyebrows, as she said it: _I don’t need one of her retainers to make certain I’m behaving myself_.)

The Senator must have known as well as I did that the Queen had suspected Amidala was pregnant. She didn’t listen to gossip, but Amidala had become reluctant to meet with her in person, after all the other times she came back to Naboo during the war. The Queen had waited to see what move Amidala was going to make. She might not have known it, but she wouldn’t have had to resign. Most women do, and maybe it is what they want, but I don’t think it would have been enough for her.

Senator Zevon had a friend, a lover--Soran Hume, a Naboo artist who worked for his family on Coruscant. I had him before, once, when I was thirteen. They had been together for over two years, and the Senator knew how to be careful.

I closed my datapad again, and turned on the large, gleaming black holoscreen on the sitting room wall. A woman with moongrey skin and large pearl eyes talked about recent events in the Upper City I didn’t know, and didn’t care about. Her voice went on in the background as I made myself a cup of instant mocha in the kitchen unit.

Then, if the Senator was careful, Amidala must have been careless. She must have known about contraceptives. My mother made certain I did, and I’m still outfitted with a contraceptive device; I don’t want children, and I won’t stay long with someone who does. And Amidala had not only been brilliant, and cunning, but a _genius_.

Finally, though it was earlier than I prefer to go to sleep, I shut off the holoscreen, and the lights, and crawled into the bed. I closed my eyes, and shivered under the cold, snowfall blankets. I pulled them tighter and higher around me, and after a while, that did help. I lay there and listened to the noises outside. I wasn’t sleepy, but my legs were heavy and soggy-full of sand, and I didn’t want to get up. The mattress was heavy and solid underneath me. I flopped over onto my stomach.

I must have fallen asleep then, because minutes later I was startled awake by something moving across the window. I sat up and blinked at the lights that glowed through the curtains as they moved with a slow, mechanical swish. It was only the window cleaners. I lay down again, and waited for the sound to go away.

\--

When I fell back into sleep, I was in a long hallway with star lights glittering at least mile ahead on the huge ceiling. Since it was a dream, this was a hallway in the main, governmental part of the palace in Theed. I couldn’t remember the reason anymore, or maybe I had never known it, but I was there because the Queen, or Governor Strand, wanted me to find the Inquisitor. I had told them, with a shaking, frightened thrill that almost felt like giggling, that I didn’t want to, that _I couldn’t_. But I had just heard their muffled voices in the Queen’s bedroom as they told me I had to. Now, I was walking through the shadows, waiting to see him, knowing he had to be nearby.

He had to be, because I wanted him to.

Then: I was upstairs in the throne room, where the Queen’s bed had been moved, its blankets in a huge, ocean wave heap. I was barefoot, and my feet seemed to almost glow with moonlight. I stared and down and watched them. I was wearing the slinky black dress I had found after looking a long rack of dresses. It was so low cut my breasts were nearly bare. The others were there to help me get ready. The blankets heaved and churned around on the Queen’s bed. _He’s going to see me_! I said.

_He wants to see you_ , Sorsché said, pulling on my hair.

Esteé stood over by the bed and watched me. She had grown a skinny, black mustache and wore artificial legs with little blue silk shoes on the feet. She was polishing one of her thighs with a handkerchief. _But that’s what you want_.

_But I don’t know how_ , I said, my voice lost in that huge room.

(And I remembered something I thought had happened, and it had in another dream. The Inquisitor, in his long, smothering black cloak, had led me up to my room at my parents’ house. I wanted to talk to him, but my voice hadn’t worked when I tried. My skin glowed with steam. He had been stern, and annoyed, and then--)

Then I was walking down that hallway again, because I had seen him—no, the Queen had seen him. I had to find him. I must have, because my bedroom was at the end of the hall, and he was there with me. My heartbeat moved too fast. His eyepiece glared at me as we sat on a swollen, dingy pink sopha. _Tell me about the Queen_ , he said.

His voice was too deep and spun too far away. He slid his hand between my thighs, and I watched myself spread my legs. _Brisaé, what are you hiding? I think I know, but you still need to tell me—_

\--

The next morning, Oppelia came to help me with my hair. I sat on a plump Queen Yarm style chair by the mirror and watched the quick flashes of her hands as she worked. It was damp and faded grey outside, and I had heard it raining when I woke up. I shifted my hips around a little, and made a big, careful yawn. I hadn’t slept well, or long enough, and I still feel slow and burnt out and tired. Oppelia must have noticed, but she would have known not to say anything.

She only said: “You have nice hair, Miss Melior. And it’s easy to work with, which is always a help.”

“Thank you.” I shut my eyes and saw only the darkness behind my lids. I had been relieved when Oppelia answered her comm. I didn’t want to spend any more time alone with my own thinking voice. Now that Oppelia was here, I could be the good, proper Naboo woman I could tell she thought I was.

Even though only a few hours ago, after I fell out of that dream, my cunt sore and slightly rain-damp. I had pushed myself against the mattress for several lazy minutes, but when I reached down and touched myself, it didn’t work. Finally, I had rolled onto my back and pinched and tweaked my nipples, angry and hard, thinking of, thinking of—

“Did you have a good night, Miss Melior?” Oppelia said, in a perfectly innocent, polite, ordinary way.

“It could have been better,” I said. “I didn’t sleep very well.”

“Oh, I know about that. I couldn’t sleep for hours the first night I was here. I couldn’t even manage to shut my eyes. The air smelled different, and I don’t know—wrong. It might take a while to adjust, but I’m sure you will.”

She finished off my hair with several black bug-legged hairpins; I could feel her slid them into place. “There. Senator Zevon is probably ready to see you by now.”

“Then I should go see her,” I said.

We rode the glass bubble lift up to the Senator’s floor. Oppelia waited until I had stepped out, and then followed. I couldn’t hear her footsteps behind me—she was well trained. I noticed two trees with wilted, pale leaves growing out of bone stone pots in the hallway near the Senator’s door. I could smell the damp, dark soil. The air circulators turned out with a sign, and returned to recycling the same old, dried up air.

No one was in the sitting room as we walked in. “Just a moment,” Oppelia said. “I shall go see if Senator Zevon is ready to receive you.”

She left, and a long, dragging minute later, I heard Senator Zevon’s voice. A man with a gentle, sensitive, kind tenor voice answered her. Soran Hume. I had only met him that once, but I remembered he was the sort of man I still wanted, almost, nearly to be attracted to—and last year, I was sleeping with a man who reminded me of him. They were quiet. Then Senator Zevon came in, with Uma just behind her. The Senator wore a violet-red walking gown, and her hair was loose, but artfully so. 

“Miss Melior,” she said. “I trust you slept well enough.”

_I tried_ , I thought. “Yes.”

“We should be sitting down to eat soon,” she said. “I do have a committee meeting, but it isn’t for another hour, so we have time. I assume that you are planning on staying for that?”

“That was my intention,” I said.

Uma left, and Senator Zevon turned as Soran Hume came over to join her. He wore a fashionable linen Coruscanti suit, and his curly, maple-red hair was still damp. He was in his early thirties then, and fresh and pretty. (I suspect he probably still is.) My mother would have liked him, and my aunt Saben would have adored him. Senator Zevon gave him a teasing, sly smile I would have expected from her.

She took his hand, and: “You know just when to make an entrance. Soran, this is Miss Melior. She’s one of the Queen’s senior aides. Miss Melior, this is Soran Hume. He’s an artist, and—I like to think—a gentleman.”

“I think we’ve met before,” I said, as I took his hand.

“Right,” he said. “I remember that. It was at my cousin’s art gallery reception. You’re Anné Melior’s daughter. I think you were taking an art class at the time, and you told me about a painting you had just started.”

“I’m surprised you remember all that,” I said. “I must have seemed like a silly little girl at the time.”

“I hope it’s a pleasant surprise,” he said, as though he did know you don’t always want people to remember the way you used to be. I have learned that better than I like.

Senator Zevon looked back and forth between us. “You didn’t tell me you had met before, Miss Melior.”

“Well, you can’t expect to know everything about someone after the first meeting, Ara,” Soran said, his voice the fond, teasing echo of hers.

The Senator gave him another smile. “True. Now, this shouldn’t take long, but I do need to speak with Miss Melior alone for a few minutes. Political business.”

“I’ll leave you to that,” he said, and let her hand go with a squeeze. I could hear one of the handmaidens, or the house-droid, moving around in the next room, and there was a rain-sprinkle of silverware, or glasses.

Senator Zevon leaned in close before she said: “Are you going to tell the Queen?”

“I don’t know what you’re referring to.”

She smiled, but her voice was a hiss. “Don’t be coy with me. Her Most Pure Highness will surely want to hear that you’ve met my lover. That I’ve been with him when I should have been dedicating every moment of that time to the care of Naboo.”

“Milady,” I said, and I knew I had to be careful. “I thought I was clear about this yesterday. I’m not going to tell the Queen about your personal life. That isn’t my job.”

“I want to believe you,” she said. “I really do. You know the Queen could have told Amidala to resign once word was out she was pregnant. She probably should have, but she couldn’t. But she could bring me down in her place.”

“Milady--” I said.

“I’m not Amidala. I know that. And I’m not going to pay for her sins. I’m telling you, Miss Melior, _I won’t_.”

“Milady,” I said again. I didn’t have time to know what I should say, only what I could: “You’re a grown woman, and your life is your own. Amidala’s wasn’t, but that was her choice. Now, we should probably go in to eat.”

Soran stood by the window in the dining room, while the droid, a fem model with long, long legs and purple glass eyes, came back and forth with varied dishes and a platter of bright, expensively imported fruit. Senator Zevon went right over to him. I looked away, but I still heard the wet, key locking sound as they kissed. They could have hidden it, but this was the Senator’s apartment, and I did already know.

The droid came back in with a pot of tea, or caf, or mocha, and the Senator murmured something to Soran. I went over to the window a few feet away from them and looked out. The sky was rippling and shaking with rain, and a handle of drops scattered against the window before the heating units melted it away.

\--

The Queen’s holo image was fuzzed with light when I called her several days later. I couldn’t see the room behind her, but I did notice when a cloak blurred away over at her side. The others would have wanted to be there to see me. I sat in the sitting room of the apartment, on the couch still smelled like an unfamiliar perfume. I had checked my chrono, and I knew that in Theed, it was the first, grey minutes of evening. They could look up and see the edge of one of the moons over the palace, and the stars.

Before that, I had always lived in places where I could see the millions of glittering white suns, some of them already dead. I had never had to think about them. Sometimes, I would go out on balcony and try to recognize something in the sky. Of course, I knew not to bother the Queen with any of that.

“Have you heard anything yet?” the Queen said. Her eyes were black in the holo, actually black, the color of space, and hard as the stone in the Senator’s ring. Her skin kept blurring and fading away into static.

“Nothing worth talking about, Your Highness,” I said.

The day before, I had sat through one of the long, long senate sessions. They had been discussing, and then screaming over, trade routes in the Abrion Sector. The Corellian Senator had tried to bring up another issue, but I couldn’t hear him over their voices. Senator Zevon had not once made an attempt to take the floor. Oppelia sat next to me with an earnest, concerned look. I tried to listen, but I was bored after the first few minutes.

“Senator Zevon told me people don’t like to talk about the systems that are suspected of disloyalty to the Empire,” I said. “It’s too risky, even in private. And I’ve seen for myself that it’s so. And then there is the fact that Naboo, unlike those other systems, is the Emperor’s homeworld.”

“True,” said the Queen. “But he hasn’t been overly concerned with Naboo for longer than both of us have been alive. I doubt it makes much difference.”

“You’re probably right,” I said. Her image stopped, and I went on: “It’s still too soon, Your Highness. I haven’t been in the right places to hear anything, and maybe, you know, maybe there isn’t anything to hear. We’ve become the small, provincial planet too close to the Outer Rim to be any importance that we used to be.”

The Queen waited. “Perhaps. That would make things a great deal easier.” (Her voice faded, and I could feel all the space between us.) “But you’re right. It’s soon yet, and I never expected you to know anything already. Wait, and listen, and you’ll find out where to look. I’m certain of that. Is there anything else you want to tell me?”

There was. “Inquisitor Mevath actually did leave Coruscant again, but he returned only the other day. He has always known what we want to.”

I can’t remember exactly what the Queen said next, but I know what she would have said. There was only a faint grease-crackle of static in her voice. “I know, and if you can get close enough to him for a bit of eavesdropping, you should. But remember, that world is the Inquisitor’s area. He has the advantage.”

\--

The Inquisitor had just returned from a brief trip to Alderaan. I had heard several of Senator Zevon’s colleagues mention that in the crowded senate hallway. They had moved right on to another topic, and I couldn’t ask them if they knew anything else. When I stood on my balcony at night, I could see the top floors of the Imperial Intelligence headquarters. I watched the several burning windows, and wondered if he was there, in one of the rooms behind them. I would sip at a glass of the sleek, cold starfruit wine, and imagine, _and dread_ , what he might be doing.

And: Senator Zevon had told me that he questioned her only the day before he would have left for Naboo and Theed. He had wanted to know what she knew about the Jedi. She hadn’t been able to tell him anything, but (she said in a distant, puzzled voice) he hadn’t continued to press her. And yes, she had told the Queen.

I could only wonder if she had ever meant to tell me.

Or: if that was something else she wanted to protect me from.

I hadn’t see the Inquisitor since he questioned me in the parlour. I hadn’t even dreamt about him since that first night. I could only think about him when I was waiting, in my speeder-lit room, to fall asleep, my nightgown in a tangle around my knees. He looked at me, again, and again, with his ghost eye, and the other eye. I didn’t know much about him, but I knew that this planet, this city, was where he had his life.

_He wants what any man would, you know_? Uma would tell me, much later, when I didn’t have to imagine what she meant.

I had overheard one of Senator Mothma’s aides talking with her friend and colleague in a gleeful whisper about a woman they knew and did not like, who had supposedly slept with, fucked, both him and Inquisitor Redge. She had her position because of her grandmother, and she had rolled her eyes, and said in her annoying, cooing voice, _Oh, come on. It isn’t that strange. They are still human_.

I almost wish I could write here that I couldn’t understand how that woman could want to be with Inquisitor. But nothing in this story or memoir is a secret, and so I won’t. Even if I hadn’t, I wasn’t naïve enough to gasp with disgust. I knew it was possible. The Inquisitors had power, and that will always be enough for some people. But that wasn’t why I thought about him, and I won’t bother to pretend I didn’t know that. I did.

\--

There were five senators in the subcommittee who met at the receiving room in Senator Zevon’s offices. She had had it redecorated with long, sleek sophas and several statues of wooden boned girls hidden back in the miniature trees. The house-droid was there to wait on them with its, with her, dove-coo voice that was meant to sound soothing, but I don’t think the Senators even noticed her. They were too busy talking while they shrugged off their cloaks, or coats, and sat down.

This was the first time Senator Zevon had asked me to sit on one of the meetings. Usually, they met in Senator Organa’s office, but he was off-world. I wasn’t certain what I could hope to accomplish, but I had agreed. And I did need them to get used to me.

I watched the Senators as they smiled, and nodded, and greeted one another, in the most polite, conventional, easy ways. None of them touched Senator Zevon’s shoulder in a light pat, or pressed a kiss on her cheek, not even the Corellian senator, Seamus Thon. The Naboo were known on Coruscant for being formal and private. My mother had always hugged us, too much and too close for my liking, though I never told her. But that wasn’t what those Senators would have believed.

“Senator,” Senator Zevon said to each of them.

“Senator,” they all said in reply.

Before the meeting started, she was talking with an ink-blue woman with sleepy eyes and a diamond stud in her nose, her lekku stuffed under her headdress. Her name, Chi Eekway, sounded like a little mouse-sharp squeak. I’ve forgotten what eventually happened to her, and that is probably just as well.

“Senator,” she said to Senator Zevon, “I do like what you’ve done with this room. It’s so relaxing. One could almost look forward to coming in to work.”

“Oh, thank you,” said Senator Zevon. “But I can’t take any of the credit for it. That goes to the architect I flew in from Naboo.”

“But you knew how to find the right architect,” Senator Eekway said. “And I think you deserve at least the credit for that--”

I recognized most of the Senators from their holos, or the senate hallway. Mon Mothma from Chandrila was an earnest young woman with practically short red hair. She wore the same white gown and silver headpiece she did in all the holos I had seen. She had just returned from her two month maternity leave on Chandrila with her new daughter. Giddean Danu, the Senator from Kuat, was a dark man who looked tired and severe. I had been with Senator Zevon when he stopped her in the senate hallway. And I’ve already mentioned Senator Eekway. They would have, I could not help but think, all known Amidala when she had been the senator from Naboo.

The other two senators hadn’t. One of them, a small woman with frenzied, purple gleaming hair in a nun black gown, was the newest Senator from Kekropia; I had seen her before, but we hadn’t been introduced. Senator Thon had taken the place of Garm Bel Iblis—another senator no one wanted to discuss openly or secretly—only six months before that. And there were other senators, like Fang Zar, who couldn’t be there anymore.

The droid moved around the room with a tray full of drinks. Senator Danu, who had just sat down with Senator Thon, accepted one of them. Senator Eekway drifted over and took one before she joined them. Senator Zevon was still talking with Senator Mothma and the Kekropian woman. She looked over at me, and I knew what to do.

“This is the representative from the Queen, Miss Melior,” she said. “She’s here to make certain I believe myself according to our traditions.”

“Hello, Miss Melior,” said Senator Mothma, and I returned her greeting.

Senator Zevon turned to the Kekropian senator. “You won’t have met Alecto Bly before. She was only recently appointed to replace Senator Locke.”

“Hullo,” said Senator Bly with a slight, thoughtful smile. She leaned forward on a honey-glossed wooden cane, though I wouldn’t know until later that she had an artificial right leg, made for her by a body artist in the Kekropian capital, The Labyrinth. I never saw it, so I could only imagine its silver coin gleam.

“What do you think of _Imperial Center_ so far?” she said,

“I haven’t decided yet,” I said. She spoke as though she had to think about each word first, and I remembered she had only just learned Basic the year before, after Senator Locke resigned. Kekropia was one of those worlds people were afraid to mention.

“That’s a good answer.” Now that I saw her up close, she looked at least forty, and may have been even ten years older than that. She wasn’t Senator Mothma, the current youngest senator, or Senator Zevon, or yes, Amidala. She had been assigned to her position mostly, or only, because she was related to Queen Leocadia. But I didn’t look down on her for that. I didn’t learn this in Naboo history class, but our pure and shining Queens have appointed senators for reasons that aren’t much different.

“It is different, especially at first,” said Senator Mothma. “But I know I was surprised at how quickly it all became normal. How long are you planning to stay?”

“I don’t think it should be too long,” I said, and tried to sound careful (since everyone had to be) but not too careful. “I just have a few things to look after.”

“The meeting is starting up in another minute,” Senator Zevon said. “I need to check with my assistant about something, but I shall see you all there.”

I sat on the sopha next to Senator Mothma. Senator Zevon sat on my other side when she came back. Danu, Thon, and Eekway sat in a row across from us. Senator Thon took one of the drinks just as the meeting started. I tried to look attentive. Senator Zevon had already told me they were there to go over the last revisions on the bill they were preparing to present concerning individual planetary sovereignty rights. I think that was it. They had over one thousand signatures, but for the senate, that wasn’t very much, and some of them were from senators still known to have been in the Delegation of 2000.

After several more minutes of social murmuring, they went to it. It was as dull as I had expected, but I listened for anything I might need.

“My office has looked over the latest document,” Senator Thon was saying. “I don’t have any more suggestions.”

“I have a few corrections for the third section,” said Senator Mothma. “My aide will send them to your datapads after the meeting.”

“Then, if those are minor enough, we should be ready,” Senator Danu said. “We should have enough support for another five hundred signatures. We’ll only need five hundred more to have an unlucky two thousand.”

“You never know,” Senator Mothma said. “The bill could actually pass.”

“One can always hope,” said Senator Zevon, all the more cynical for her pleasant, swan-deep, soothing voice. _I’m not Amidala_ , she had said, and she wasn’t, in more than the way she had intended. Though I have wondered, on occasion, what Amidala would have thought had she lived to see the Empire. No one will ever know that answer.

Then Senator Danu said: “This must be a shock for you, Miss Melior.”

I looked over at him, and yes: he may have been able to see me, but I was still surprised he had actually spoken to me. They all knew I was observing the meeting for my queen, and at least a few of them must have resented my presence. “What do you mean?”

“Perhaps that wasn’t the right word,” said Senator Danu, and he actually gave me a brief, amused smile. “But you can see for yourself just how much power we have. Oh, the Emperor likes to us to keep busy with our various projects. It keeps us occupied. But he hasn't actually needed the results for some time.”

“It’s true we don’t always keep up on things in the capital on Naboo,” I said. “We’ve heard a few things from Senator Zevon, but—I don’t think the Queen fully realizes just what the senate has become.”

“But she does wish to better understand,” said Senator Zevon. “That is the main reason that Miss Melior is here.”

The Senators nodded. I shifted back in my place on the sopha as they went back to discussing tiny, footnoted details in their bill, and then on to several related matters. They never did mention Naboo, and I would have noticed if they had. I managed to distract myself by thinking over what the Queen had said about the Inquisitor. I hadn’t seen him yet, and I couldn’t approach him in any open, obvious ways. But there had to be one, and I just had to think of it. My corset clenched as I breathed, but no one else noticed.

But finally, the meeting started to break up. Senator Danu had just stood up, and: “You’ll have to excuse me, Senator Zevon. Senators. I have another appointment downstairs that I only wish could wait. You know how that is.”

“I know it too well,” Senator Zevon said as she stood up with him.

While the others were making their ways out, Senator Mothma stopped to see me. She was, I had thought the other times I had seen her, very serious. She had the delicate, sand-freckled skin redheads tend towards, and her gown was severely plain. She only wore a plain, knife-silver wedding ring for jewelry.

“It was a pleasure to meet you, Miss Melior,” she said. And she might have been a politician, but she sounded as though she meant it.

“Likewise,” I said. Senator Mothma always was a nice woman, and practical, intelligent, and trustworthy--the way I wanted other people to see me. I might have been friends with her if I had met her at another time, and we had been other people.

Then: “I was wondering--” I said. She waited for me to go on. She might not have asked me what my purpose, my true purpose, was, but she was curious. “What was Senator Amidala like? You knew her, didn’t you.”

“Yes,” said Senator Mothma. “I can’t say I knew her well, but I did know her. She still had all the qualities she must have had as a child-queen, but I’m afraid they weren’t as appealing in a grown woman. I think she really thought everyone could be as idealistic—as good—as she was. But still, I admired her. Most of the senate did.”

“She’s more than admired on Naboo,” I heard my voice say. “She’s become an image no one can touch. If we had a dictatorship, it would be a thought crime to speak ill of her. But it would be all right, because no one would.”

“I think I’ve heard that,” said Senator Mothma. “But I should tell you now, because you’ll see for yourself soon enough. Amidala has—a different reputation here these days. People remember her as the girl-queen who knew what she was doing when she called for that vote of no confidence against Valorum. She’s known as the heroine of the Empire who raised Palpatine to power.”

I hadn’t heard that, and I didn’t know what to think. And I noticed that while Senator Mothma hadn’t said she believed it, she hadn’t said she didn’t. “But—Senator Amidala helped form the Delegation of 2000. She wouldn’t have wanted the Empire.”

“That’s the truth,” said Senator Mothma. “And people have little enough use for that around here. It doesn’t help that she was only really involved with the delegation at the beginning. She was—preoccupied with other matters.”

“I know,” I said. “She would have been pregnant by then.”

“We guessed as much at the time,” said Senator Mothma. “Or at least, I did. I would call it women’s initiation, but she never hid the pregnancy all that well. I thought she would tell us when she felt ready, but, well. She never did. I wondered at the time if there was something unpleasant with the baby’s father. Of course, we’ll never know.”

After she left, Senator Zevon turned from her own meeting with Senator Thon to look at me, and I had to remember, once again, that she could see me. I gave her a silent, knowing smile, and walked over to join them.

I hadn’t learned what I needed, but I did know what I should have about Amidala, and I’m glad now that I found out before I saw the underground cartoon of her as a puppet-doll with Palpatine holding, and pulling, the ends of her strings. I had already decided I wouldn’t tell the Queen. I remembered the two times I had attended her while she met with Amidala—she had been too fawning, and eager, and nervous. The woman was supposed to be her mentor, but she was always the wonderful, perfect _Amidala_.

That was the first secret I kept to myself—I don’t think I ever even told the other handmaidens. But it would not be the last, or alas, the worst.

\--

But then, I have always been my own secret. That isn’t quite what I wanted to write here, but it’s close enough, and it’s going to have to do. Everyone I knew wanted to think I was a _good girl_ , and I let them, even though I wasn’t always sure what that meant. I was well-behaved, and made good marks in school, and spoke up for myself in a modest way, all I knew all of that was good. I may have been cold, and (as one of my secondary school teachers said in a dramatic, resentful hiss) sly. I was awkward and easily annoyed with smaller children, but the women only teeheed. I didn’t have to be a little mother. Erised had already taken care of that. I was still, yes, good.

And: it wasn’t as though that was all a lie. I should say that. But it was easy. I’ve always been good at listening silently while other people--the girls who were at my friends at school, the other handmaidens, my recent sweetheart lover--talked. They talked, and I would keep my own stories to myself.

People see what they want to see. They believe what they want to believe.

It sounds so obvious, like something I hardly need to write down. It’s why even Amidala’s advisors could look at her decoy and see her. I believed it. I thought I could fool anyone, and they wouldn’t know, because they couldn’t even see me. That was—and this is no longer a secret—my worst flaw. The Inquisitor had seen it, and warned me. 

_He knows_ , I thought.

Later that same night, I dismissed that away as a foolish, deluded illusion. He didn’t know anything about me. He only saw me as an earnest, loyal (and tiresomely so), and yes, _good_ handmaiden. I reminded myself of that during the times I turned over in bed, in the moonlight from my window. I would pull my nightdress up and reach down to stroke and work myself between my legs. He was coming for me again. This time, _he was really annoyed_. I smiled as I got away from him. Or I would forget about him after that, as I thought about other, familiar fantasies.

_From childhood’s hour_ , I could write here. It’s a line from a poem I read when I was in school. _I did not love as others loved—_

I was never interested in the popular boys the other girls talked about. I watched them after school with my friends, but their games bored me. No: when I was thirteen, I would quarrel with and tease Crispin, a boy several years my senior who lived on my street. He would chase me through the fields near the river, and when I wanted it, when I allowed it to happen,, he would knock me into the grass. Once, he was so angry he slapped me across the face while I smirked back, gasping, at him.

Then there was my history teacher my last year of school. He was in his forties, with long iron-grey hair and stained teeth. I remember his name, but I won’t write it down. He was known as one of the most nastily difficult teachers at the school, and I wasn’t in love with him, but he did interest me. I would blush and stammer when I had a conference with him about an essay. Yes, I knew he had a nice, sweet wife at home—my mother knew her socially—who he climbed on top of at nights for some wholesome, dull _lovemaking_.

But I could only talk properly to him after he gave me an annoyed glare. I liked the squirming in my stomach, and between my legs, when he easily, casually, said the name that used to be mine.

When I entered into service, I was still only fifteen. So for the next several years, I had to get myself off alone, pinching myself, hard, and then harder, while I imagined a man with an echoing, underwater voice and lush, dark curls I had never actually met. He would come for me, he would catch me, _and I knew what he would do next_.

I could write here that if I had never met the Inquisitor, I would have changed. I would met the right, nice young man and wanted what he did. But I won’t. It’s wishful thinking, and it bores me, and I haven’t time for that. I know, if I know anything, that if I had never met the Inquisitor, if this story had never happened, eventually, I would have met someone else much like him. Eventually, I would have gotten what I wanted.

\--

Senator Zevon came up to my apartment the evening after the subcommittee meeting. We went out onto the balcony, while Uma turned on the tall, moonglow lamp at the edge of the sitting room. It was cool with a faint, teasing breeze, and the sky was turning that bruised, night purple. A tame bird sighed on a nearby balcony. We sat down on one of the sleek sophas, and Uma brought us two glasses of wine. She hadn’t needed to ask me to find the kitchen. The Senator sipped at hers, staring out into the sky, but I finally set mine down, still sloppy full, over on the caf table.

I was surprised at how quiet the Senator was, but I didn’t mind it. It was enough to sit there as the sky grew darker. Uma stood over by the statue, watching us.

Finally, the Senator said, after she swallowed a sip of her wine: “I had a holocall with the Queen today. All is well on Naboo.”

“That’s better than the alternative,” I said.

“How true. But once this session is over, I should go back there for at least a fortnight. Soran has wanted to do that for months, but then, he won’t have to deal with the local politicians, and I will. I suppose you know about the little Naberrie. The Queen thinks she’ll make Princess of Theed in a few years, and you know what that means.”

“And what is that?” I said.

“Oh, come now, Miss Melior.” She sighed, almost in disgust, but I couldn’t see her well enough to be sure. “What do you think? The girl is only Amidala’s niece, and people will just adore that. And she has been very well groomed. But who knows—I might not be around anymore once she’s old enough to replace me.”

The Queen had started favoring Pooja Naberrie only months before. She had her over to the palace for earnest, political talk over tea and little pink cakes. Pooja had seemed like a nice enough girl. She was ten years old, with sugar and spice curls and dark eyes and sharp eyebrows. She didn’t look like my memories of Amidala, though that may have changed. The Queen didn’t discuss her with us, but I knew Senator Zevon was right. She would become Princess of Theed within the next five years. And after that?

I shrugged, and looked out at the dark buildings towering around. There were the usual last few lit windows at Imperial Intelligence headquarters.

“Have you ever seen him?” said Senator Zevon.

“Who?” I said. I turned back to see she was looking over at the same building, and the same windows, I had. She had noticed, and she knew.

But it was obvious that she wasn’t going to care. “Inquisitor Mevath.”

“Oh.” The tamed bird shrieked again, and I could see its shadow moving in a golden cage on the next balcony. “Yes, I saw him when he came to the palace to—speak with the Queen. But only that one time.”

“He’s freaky,” she said. “I think it might be partly because he’s skew eyed. I still remember that first time he looked at me. Our ancestors would have made some primitive, witch-spell sign to protect themselves. But that’s only partly it, and I don’t know how to explain it. He looked at me as though he had already read my mind, and it bored him.”

“I think I understand what you mean,” I said.

“And you know,” she said. “He was actually quite polite the entire time. I think it would have been better if he hadn’t been. He just keep talking, and talking, in this oddly kind, soothing voice. I thought I was losing my mind.”

“He is not a nice man,” I said.

“This is not an Empire for nice men, Miss Melior,” she said. “Not that the Republic was all that much better. But unlike the Emperor and his right hand bruiser, the Inquisitor is a normal man. Well, in comparison. He keeps a low profile when he’s not bringing in rebels for the Empire, but I’ve heard things. Trust me.”

Oh, I wanted to. I took the first sips of my wine, and after another moment, she said: “Have you heard anything useful about Naboo?”

“No,” I said. “Intelligence only lets the public know if they’ve caught any Jedi, and they didn’t manage that on Naboo. (Yes— _they hadn’t caught any_.) “They’re too careful, and I haven’t heard anything I didn’t already know.”

She looked back at Imperial Intelligence. One of the lights had turned off. “Now, he would know what’s going on, though I doubt he would share it with you. Still, there are ways to get information when you need it badly enough. You just have to find them.”

“Yes,” I said, watching the light in another window go dark. “I think I need to go about another way of doing that.”

Uma’s heels clicked towards us over the floor. I had almost forgotten she was there. The air started to sting with tiny, metal-winged insects, and we got up to go back inside. I smacked at them as they swarmed around me, and later that night, I would feel out, and scratch, a swollen-stiff bite on my throat. Senator Zevon slapped at them with her free hand while she finished her wine in several big, shaking gulps.

\--

Senator Zevon had given me a password that opened up classified documents and files through the holonet, and I had started looking around there, almost at random and (yes, that word again) secretly. I didn’t want to risk my own datapad, so I only worked on a borrowed, and disposable, one. I had already, and more easily than I had expected, accessed subcommittee reports going back to the first year of the Empire, and filings in various Senator’s offices. Only one report mentioned Naboo. I read through it several times, even though I had been awake so long it was turning light outside, but it wasn’t important. The senate files were all safe enough. I hadn’t dared to break into the Imperial Intelligence databanks. Or rather, I hadn’t dared to try.

She had said during our last holocall: _Eventually, they will make their move against us. And then, they won’t have any more reasons to hide_.

I sat on the sopha in my bright, glaring sitting room, and opened my datapad and woke it up. The holo played the news, and then an interactive movie, behind me. I started out with random, safe files, until my shoulders were so hunched over and sore I had to stand up and walk around the room. But I knew what I wanted to find. I might not have known what our enemies were planning. But I did know who they were. 

I only had to search for ten minutes before I found several files on the Inquisitor. They were both classified, and one of them was locked with several layers of passwords, but I still managed to access them. It went too easily, but I remembered that I could clean the datapad before I destroyed it, and went ahead. I clicked in the password, sent it, and waited. The datapad made a series of clicks, and ( _he’ll know, he’ll know what you’re doing_ ) the files came up on the screen.

I made myself take a sip from my limon water. It tasted slick and cold as the glass it was in. The speeder lights went on moving outside the window, and the holo shook with a sudden burst of bird-shrieking laughter. I looked back at the screen.

**SUBJECT: Endymion Mevath, High Inquisitor**.

The first file had his personnel information. I skimmed through in a blur, but there was very little about him on it beyond his age. He was thirty five. There was an attachment linked at the bottom with the dates and locations of his assignments over the previous seven months. Most of that information was in code, but I could make out that he had been on Alderaan, and before that, Naboo.

But I already knew that. I looked through the list another time, and went on to the second file--quickly, before I thought better of it. I didn’t know if I could get through all the passwords to decode it, but I managed, and I read it all. Even now, I don’t think I can write about what I found in there. But I can say it showed me what I wanted to do next.

\--

The nightclub was located in the mid-city, on a street that was lit and flashing with purple and red and green neon lights. I got off the airtaxi at the corner, and walked down the street toward the address I had written down. That was the first I had seen what Coruscant was like outside the clean, well-ordered senate district. Most of the buildings were closed and dark, some of them permanently, and candy wrappers and cigaret, and yes, deathstick stubs drifted against the curbs. The only other business open was a small caf house several doors away from the club. I knew I had found the right place when I saw a group of women in bright dresses, most of them human, standing on the walk.

It was dark when I went inside, but after I waited for a few moments while my eyes adjusted, I could see. I went over to the bar and sat down. The sound system was pounding and throbbing with techno music. I could see people’s mouths move as they laughed, but I couldn’t hear them. Most of them were watching a game on the holoscreen across the room, and a Rodian at the other end of the bar seemed to be accepting bets.

The bartender saw me and came over. I ordered a rosekiss, because it was the first, and only thing, I could think of. I needed the time while I drank it.

The bartender came back with my drink in a tall, round glass within minutes. I took one sip of the glittering drink, and watched the moving, swaying bar lights in the glass. I took another small, careful sip and set it down. There was a kiss of my black lipstick on the rim. I crossed my legs, and my skirts ssshed between my thighs.

“Miss Melior?” a woman said right behind me.

I turned on my stool to see Uma, Senator Zevon’s handmaiden. I thought she was alone at first, and then a man with dark brown skin, little bell-beads in his braided hair, came up and joined her. Uma’s teeth glowed when she smiled at me. She wore a rustling dress that was probably purple that left her arms and shoulders bare. I noticed the forest snake tattoo that twisted around her upper left arm.

“Well, well,” she said, leaning in so I could hear her. “I would never have expected to see you here, Miss Melior. I wonder what you can possibly be up to.”

“I could ask you the same question,” I said, in my loudest voice. The music had turned up until I thought I was going to start vibrating.

“Uma,” said her friend, in a prim, upper city Coruscanti accent. “She came here to have a drink. I should think that was obvious.”

“I know that, Genly,” she said, and gave him a quick, loving swat. “But Miss Melior is a good, political, Naboo girl. She wouldn’t come here to have her drink.”

“You’re a Naboo girl, and you do work in politics,” said Genly.

“But I’m not a proper one,” said Uma.

“Then I guess I’m not as proper as you thought,” I said.

She widened her eyes, smeared and sticky with mud-black kohl. “Apparently not. You do know how to dress the part. But I wonder what the Queen would say.”

“Her Highness understands more than you know,” I said.

“Oh, I had heard she’s grown up.” She looked over and watched while Genly leaned across the bar to order their drinks, ignoring the dealer with a fistful of death sticks hovering by his shoulder. “Well, I’ll leave you to your drink. And Miss Melior—be careful. Things can change rather suddenly around here.”

“Thank you, Uma,” I said. “I’ll do that.”

After they were gone, I picked up my drink again, and sipped it, but now I was too tensed and nervous to taste it. The music was still pounding, and the nearest holoscreen was turned to a pod race flashing over a desert on Malastare. The Rodian was taking bets from a human woman and a plump, sunset red Twi’lek. I could have left then, but this was not the time I wanted to be early. I decided I would wait until after I had finished my drink. And I wouldn’t do it in a hurry.

After I set my glass back on the bar, and paid, I went through the room to the back, and the narrow, spiraling staircase I knew was there. The air was blurred with smoke and the stairs were made out of a metal that shook when I walked.

I came out into a long, narrow bedroom lit hallway. It was lined with doors—modern beige sliding doors, doors that looked as though they had been taken off a starships, and a few old wooden doors, and they were all closed. I walked on past them. The floor was covered with a long, plush runner with a pattern of roses with swollen, vulva-pink petals and curved thorns. A woman’s voice shrieked nearby, and I thought she was screaming, or crying, but of course, she was only laughing.

A man came towards me, carrying an empty shadow-dark bottle under his arm. A woman with wild rose-red curls was with him. She was so bony that she seemed to vibrate and throb away, and her face crumpled, as she laughed. He only had to glance at her, and she stopped with one last, choked, tear-streaked gasp.

“May I be of some assistance, miss?” he said with a servant’s knowing, soothing, voice. The woman tugged at one of her curls.

“You can,” I said. (And I tried not to look at the redhead, though I could still hear her squeaked-out giggle. I don’t believe in love at first sight, but I do believe in that sort of annoyance. I had only met her a minute before and I wanted to slap her.) “I’m looking for the Summer Room.”

“You need to go to the end of the hall and turn right. It’s the first door. And—you won’t be disturbed if you don’t want to. But if you do, someone will hear you.”

The redhead looked straight at me, and stopped giggling. “She’s going to meet a bad, bad man. A bad, bad, bad, _bad_ man.”

The man turned to glare at her, but I walked away and didn’t hear what he said. I found the summer room where he told me I would, in an alcove off the end of the hall over one of the main gambling rooms. I could look right out at the glittering, crystal-ice chandelier hanging over the people, the beings, below. I left the door open behind me when I went into the room. I might have waited, but I had still gotten there first. There was a long pink silk sopha with tiny lion paw feet that might very well have come from a brothel, along with the lamps with shaking, diamond-glitter beads. But then, politicians, most of them only local, came here to meet discreetly and safely with prostitutes.

Though people also came here for other purposes. I knew that, because that was why I had arranged for the time in that room.

“You wanted to meet with me?” the Inquisitor said behind me.

I turned around just as he came in, shutting the door behind him. He wore his long, sweeping, dragging black cloak, and his hair was pulled back into a tail. He wore that eyepiece over his ghost white, winter ice eye, and his dark eye stared back at me. Then, when I didn’t speak, he twitched his mouth. I wasn’t certain I liked that, but I could have done worse than amuse him.

“Yes,” I said. “Does that surprise you?”

“I admit I wouldn’t have expected you to actually arrange to meet me, Brisaé. But I wouldn’t go so far as to say I was surprised.”

“Then you found out I was on—Imperial Center?” I said.

“I’ve already known that for a while now,” he said.

“Oh,” I said, and that was all I could say. Of course, he had known. “Of course, you have. But then, it wasn’t really ever a secret.”

The Inquisitor went over to the side table and poured an inch of two of the golden silk liqueur from the decanter someone had left there into one of the matching glasses. He watched me for a few moments while he sipped at the drink. It looked pretty, but I knew it would smell like rubber and safety glue.

He shook it around the glass, and said: “It wouldn’t have mattered if it had been. You know that, Brisaé. I would have still found out Queen Apailana had sent a representative to the capital, and I would still know why she had. And it wouldn’t be at all difficult to find out just who it was she had sent.”

“I see.” I hadn’t moved, and neither had he; I was tensed up and shivering like a just rung festival bell.

“You wanted to know if I was surprised,” he said. “I will admit to some surprise when I found out the Queen had sent you.”

“You would have never expected the Queen to send a handmaiden,” I said. “After all, I’m best left dealing with shoes and hairpieces.”

“The Naboo Royal Council probably believes that,” he said. “But she trusts you with far more than that, and we both know it. I suggest you remember that.”

“Then I will.”

“I have no doubt of that.” He took another sip of his drink. “You do know that Amidala would never have entrusted this kind of mission to a _mere_ handmaiden. Oh, no--she would have handled it herself in some clever disguise. While her loyal, faithful, boot-kissing decoy was stuck back home playing the Queen.”

“I don’t know how you know about that,” I said, even though I knew just how pathetic it sounded. “The decoy plan is kept secret.”

“There are no secrets, Brisaé,” he said.

He watched as I went over to the decanter and poured a nervous, sloppy inch into one of the glasses. It smelled as bad as I had known it would, but I didn’t have to drink it. The liqueur shook inside as I picked up the glass. My hands felt like gloves, white doll-hand gloves for a ball, or a late night garden party, and then they were real again.

“But enough of this, pleasant as it is,” he said. “Brisaé, what do you want?”

And I didn’t know what I wanted, or what I could tell him. But as I watched the mirror-light flash in his eyepiece, I knew I had to figure that out, and soon, and now. I couldn’t come right out and ask him what he knew about Naboo. He would never tell me. Finally, I smiled at him, and sipped at the liqueur. It was nasty and burned like speeder petrol, but I swallowed it down and managed not to cough.

When I had finished, I said: “I think you already know.”

“You have my interest now, Brisaé,” he said. (My name a hard, deathbird caw in his mouth, _Brisaé, Brisaé_.) “But we should sit down and discuss this properly.”

I waited until he had sat down on that pink sopha before I sat down next to him, not too close, or too distant, and patted my skirts out. I had known when I decided to come to the club that I wanted to blend in with the other women in the crowd, but I didn’t want to wear a ghastly, plastic bit of dress. The dress I was wearing was a dark silver-grey, with beaded embroidery on the low cut bodice. I had worn a copper wire headdress with it, and powdered my face, and my mouth was black with lipstick.

“You came here because you’re concerned for your homeworld,” said the Inquisitor. His voice was too close and deep, the way it had been in that dream. “You’re concerned for your queen. And you think I know what you need to.”

“You could say that,” I said. “But I’m not naïve enough to think you would actually tell me any of it. That would be far, far too easy.”

“It wouldn’t help you much if I did.” His eyepiece flashed at me with the reflected overhead light. I didn’t try to figure out from his voice what he thought. “I only follow orders, and I don’t think you quite understand that. I won’t have a say in whatever ultimately happens to Naboo, or to Apailana.”

“But you do know what might happen,” I said.

I couldn’t remember having moved, but I had gotten closer to him. My skirts brushed against his leg. But I made myself look blank, and coldly bored, and set my glass down on the little white caf table. My mouth was still sticky from the liqueur. I think I decided then, in that moment, as I swallowed the taste of it away, that I would watch and see what happened next. I wouldn’t even attempt to control it.

“I know Naboo is not one of the Emperor’s top priorities,” said the Inquisitor. “But that can always change. If Apailana does not learn to compromise, and soon, Lord Vader may find cause to be involved. I don’t have to explain that to you.”

“No, you don’t,” I said. A chrono started ding-dinging the time in the next room. The Inquisitor finished his drink, and he looked into the emptied glass as he said:

“Do you know what happened to the Jedi we were looking for in Theed? The ones that, had we been there only several days before, we would have found?”

“They’re dead,” I said, in the coldest, worst voice I could manage.

“Yes.” The Inquisitor looked back to me. “They’re dead. My men tracked them down to a slum in Eriadu. I heard there were four of them. It would have been far safer, and more sensible, if they had split up, but humanoids do tend to be social animals. And I think you know how we found them. We can thank your friend Esteé for that.”

That was what I had found in the second, locked document. I read through it over and over again, but I hadn’t even been shocked the first time. I had already known. That during the third and final day of interrogation: _The decoy has started talking. At first, it was mostly nonsense babble, but now she’s said the Jedi went on to Abregado Rae, where they took a transport off world. She says she knows their identification numbers, everything. She may be lying, but we’ll see soon enough_.

“Yes, I know that,” I said.

“That must bother you, Brisaé,” the Inquisitor said. His voice was soft, and I was so close I was almost sitting in his lap. I bumped his leg with my foot. “The Queen told Esteé about the Jedi, but she didn’t trust you enough to tell you.”

I only shrugged. “Esteé is the assigned decoy. You should know then that makes her the first handmaiden. She knows things we—don’t need to.”

He smelled like the dark, musky cologne I remembered. I shifted around on the sopha, and my corset clenched me together like a vise. I gave my lower lip a sudden, nervous, cracking bite. He pretended not to see it. I spread my knees apart, just a little, just enough so I could feel the gasping between my legs. I wasn’t actually wet, _not yet_ , but I was already too warm and panting inside the dress—

“Did you wonder how you were able to access that file?” His voice was only inches away from my ear. I watched his hand, and the blood-ruby ring, on his knee. “It must have been much easier than you had expected. It was confidential information with Imperial Intelligence that only several persons had the passwords for.”

I hadn’t known, but I did then. “You allowed it to happen. You must have guessed I would look for information about you, sooner or later, and you made certain that file was available in the holonet databanks—if you had the right senate password.”

“Well, it was the least I could do for you,” he said.

Then he touched me. He slid his hand onto my thigh, pushing my skirts up, and then stopped. I must have gasped. He leaned in until I could feel his warm, rubberglue breath, and then stroked up towards my hip. And now I was wet, already and so easily, and my clit was stiff and glaring and erect. I looked down at his hand in my skirts, and that ring, because I couldn’t look him in the eye. But then I knew I had to.

“What else do you want, Brisaé?” he said.

“You already know that,” I said, and since I wasn’t a politician, even if I was pretending to be one, I went on: “I want you.”

Yes, I knew what the Inquisitor was. I will never have the excuse that I didn’t. He was not a good man, and I wouldn’t have found, if I had looked, any goodness he was still capable of. And I didn’t want to look. You could say that I was betraying the Queen. You could say that I betrayed myself. You could even say that I betrayed Esteé. There is no excuse I can make, and write down, for what I did next, and there never will be. I knew that even then. I knew, and I decided it was worth it.

\--

Oppelia helped me prepare for the night at the theatre. I watched my image inside the mirror while she brushed out my hair. It stared out, moonlight-cold pale and glaring, and I stared back. I could smell the shampoo I used, but mostly my hair just smelled like hair, like fur. Oppelia was quiet. Her hands were cool and quick, and she paused before she started working out a bug-nest tangle I had missed. She was good enough that it only hurt once. The sky outside the window was huge, dirty, greasy sea, with speeder lights swimming about in it.

I hadn’t gotten dressed yet. I could just see, in the mirror, my dark-eyed nipples through my pale snow-work chemise. The hairs on my arms were sharp. I crossed my legs together at the ankles, and tried not to move, to wiggle or shift around.

“There,” Oppelia said, and I heard her put the brush away.

I may have been excited, but I still stood up slowly and, I can even say, _regally_. She stood with her hands at her waist in that same patient, serving pose. “Thank you.”

She smiled, and it was more knowing and sly, more like Senator Zevon and Uma, than usual. The handmaidens had been talking—handmaidens always do, when they’re alone and no one else has to know—and I could guess what they had said.

“Do you want me to help you get dressed?” she said.

“No, I should be fine,” I said. “But thank you.”

My dress was laid out neatly across the bed, the way I had arranged the Queen’s gowns so many times, for so many meetings, and yes, nights at the theatre. Oppelia started straightening my small, girl-sized vanity as I went and picked it up. She had suggested that I wear this dress, the midnight, black dress Caité had included at the last minute, and I knew she was right, even if she didn’t know why. This was the time to wear it.

It had a matching corset, embroidered with golden light apples, and I put that on first, and pulled it tighttight. I looked away from Oppelia—I was used to changing, quickly and often, around other women, but now, for some reason, I felt all of my skin. The dress was slippery and trembling, and it was much easier to get into than the Queen’s gowns. 

The back gaped open, and Oppelia came over before I could ask and fastened it up.

“That dress suits you, Miss Melior,” she said. “You look lovely.”

“Really?” I said, as though it surprised me, and turned to look at myself again in the mirror, and in the space between the curtains on the window.

She was right—I did look good in the dress, and it did suit me. I hadn’t noticed it was that low cut before, so low I could almost see a candy-pink flash of my nipples. _Just like that dream_ , I must have thought. But I didn’t need it anymore.

“Really,” Oppelia said in her soft tiptoeing handmaiden voice. “Now, I think we should keep your hair simple to go with the dress. Something new, and fashionable, but not something you’ll regret next year.

I sat down next to the mirror again. The skirts of the gown were whispering-soft and sleek around my legs. “I surrender to your judgment. You know what’s best.”

While she worked, I pressed my feet hard against the floor, and listening to the hard, raindrop ticking from the nearby chrono. I heard the insect flickering as she looked through a pile of hairpins, and then heard her exhale. “So,” she said.

I looked at what I could see of her reflection in the mirror, and she went on. “What’s the play tonight? Senator Zevon is making an appearance, and she must have mentioned it, but I don’t quite remember.”

“I think it’s an ancient Alderaanian tragedy,” I said. (And I was right, and if I hadn’t been distracted, I would have remembered the title. I had only been to the art district theatre once to see an opera full of people in bird mask with long knife beaks shrieking and flapping their arms. I think they were playing actual aliens.) “One with hapless, hopeless lovers. I’ll find out soon enough. Are you going with the Senator?”

“No,” she said, and she picked up some of my hair. “I would like to, but she’s going with her lover, and she doesn’t want a chaperone for that. It’s one of the few times she doesn’t need us. And since we’re on the subject—Uma told me she saw you the other night at a club, and that you were obviously waiting to meet someone.”

Her voice had turned slippery and confiding, and though I couldn’t see her well enough to know, I’m sure she was smiling. “What made her think that?” I said.

She giggled. “Oh, Miss Melior. Uma can tell about that sort of thing. You don’t have to tell me, but you’ve nothing to be ashamed of.”

The chrono tickticked another minute away. “Then, yes, Uma was right this time. I was there to meet with someone.”

“Tell me,” she said. “If he goes to that club, he has to be fashionable, in a very mid-city, _dramatic way_. Is he from Naboo? Uma has told me she’s met more than a few people from the expatriate community there.”

Soon, Oppelia would be finished with my hair, and soon after that, I could leave. The Inquisitor had told me where to find him at the theatre, but he hadn’t given me a specific, exact time. “No,” I said. “He’s Coruscanti actually. We only met about a week ago, so I don’t know very much about him.”

“Well, I’m sure you’ll know him better soon enough,” she said.

She only took a few more minutes with my hair. After I had excused her, and I heard the apartment door slid shut, I rummaged through my wooden jewelry box, and picked out a lakewater pearl necklace my grandmother had given me for my last birthday, though I hadn’t gotten it for another month. My fingers shook as I worked with the clasp, but it finally clicked shut. Then I picked up the smudged, worn kohl pencil I had borrowed from Uma, and leaned in towards the mirror.

\--

The play was an Alderaan tragedy that night, and I still remember the title— _Blanca_. I had read it in literature class my last month in school when we had to choose a play from one of the sister worlds written during the pre-joining era. I remembered the plot, if you can even call it that, as being silly, but some of the characters were interesting. The company at the Cosmo Valorum Theatre could have worked with that, and found out how to make it better, but I could tell, when I looked down from the balcony walk, they hadn’t. It may have been the way the lead actress was shooting out her lines a throbbing, but stiff, reciting, way.

She stood in the middle of the stage near a group of trees with green silk leaves, and stared straight ahead: “I cannot find much worth in my chastity. It’s no more than this flower. You can take it. It won’t last. And my life means even less.”

She could have done several things with that, and she didn’t. I could hear some whispering from one of the boxes. They didn’t sound any more impressed than I was.

Of course, I had known that the play would be from a core world with a human population. The Emperor hadn’t even had to order the theatres to stop producing non-human, alien, works. They had known what to do.

The Inquisitor stood by the railing on the private balcony on the next level, where had told me to find him. I stopped and watched him for a moment. He was looking down at the stage, his shoulders slumped forward. His hair was loose, like one of the Coruscanti dandies, or a schoolgirl, and he wore black as usual. He had his hand on the railing, and I was disappointed, though only for a second, to see he wasn’t wearing the ring.

There was a fireworks eruption of clapping below, probably for the end of the first act. I went over to the railing and stood next to the Inquisitor. He didn’t look up, but once the next act had started, he said: “Hullo, Brisaé.”

Of course, he had known I was there, and of course, that was what I wanted. But I still decided to say, “I could have been someone else.”

“I would have known that,” he said. Then he turned to look at me. He wasn’t wearing his eyepiece, but the pale eye was swollen up with pupil, and only his dark, normal eye seemed to see me.

He leaned against the railing. “You came up on my blind side, but I could make out just enough to see who it was, and I was expecting you.”

“And I didn’t know you had a blind side,” I said.

“Really,” he said. “It must be in my personnel file, and I know you read that. But yes, I only have ten percent vision in my left eye. I’m not quite fully blind on that side, but I may as well be. Of course, I prefer that this not be widely known.”

I leaned towards him, and lowered my voice into a secret-telling whisper, though no one else was around to hear it: “But it can’t be a secret. Remember?”

Then I smiled. My necklace felt cool and bumping on my skin, and my bodice must have slipped, because my right nipple peeked out over the tighttight corset. The Inquisitor, Endymion Mevath, actually smiled. He reached out and adjusted my bodice, barely brushing my breast. His fingers were cold, but I managed not to move or even shiver. There, he might have said.

He had been barely touched me, but I could tell I would have to be patient. He looked back to the stage and: “I can see you were paying attention, Brisaé. But we should take our seats before we miss any more of this play.”

He had reserved a private box with a swaying, rusted-red velvet curtain with rustling glass beads at the bottom. The ballroom scene had started on the stage, and the music had faded into a swaying blur. There are only two chairs, and the Inquisitor waited I sat down before he did. He looked between the curtain to the stage, and so I looked with him. I could just make out the actors’ white muslin gowns fluttering in a dance. White, for the title, and because Alderaanians were always depicted as being dressed alike in peaceful, innocent, naïve white. I don’t have to go to Alderaan to know that can’t be true, even if I didn’t remember the civil war they had a few thousand years ago from class.

“You don’t seem very impressed with the production,” he said.

I shrugged, still watching the stage. “Not especially. They don’t seem to be doing much with the text. But then, I didn’t really come here to see it.”

“Then I’ll have to keep you entertained,” he said. He pushed his chair closer, and I could smell his cologne, or aftershave. The music lowered below so the audience could hear the characters’ dialogue. Slowly, carefully, I turned back to him. His mouth was just slightly chapped, and slightly sweet. It’s still strange to write that, but it was true. He smiled, and I waited for him to tell me what he wanted.

“Turn your chair forward, Brisaé,” he said.

When I had done that, he said: “Spread your legs.”

And I did, my skirts bunching up in a sloppy heap around my knees. But I made sure they stayed in place enough for me to look decent. The Inquisitor watched me for another minute, and he could not have sounded more distant, more polite, when he said:

“That’s good. Now, I want you to remember we don’t want to disturb anyone watching the performance.”

“Yes,” I said to the glowing lights down on the balcony.

“I know you will.” He stood up, and came over behind me. He reached under my skirts and pushed my thighs further apart. Then he stroked me through my knickers between my legs. His fingers were still cold, but only at first. I was already wet, and then, he had known that. He pulled my knickers down just enough with his thumb, and when he touched my clit, and rubbed it idly, and then harder, I clenched my teeth together. I don’t know I managed not to squirm around, but I didn’t, and I was quiet.

“You’re a little slut,” he said against my ear. “Aren’t you?”

“Does that bother you?” I said in a gasp.

“Hardly.” He paused before he stuck one and then two fingers inside me. Before I could stop it, I jerked my hips, and I heard my voice as I made a tiny, moaning grunt.

“Does that hurt?” he said, as he started to fuck me. And it did for the first few seconds, but not so I couldn’t bear it. I was breathing too quickly, and I had to bite down, hard, clenching, into my lower lip. I might have nodded. I felt a round glass bead of sweat slid down between my breasts, and my nipples ached.

“Well?” he said, as he went on working his fingers in and out of me.

I had to shut my eyes, and I almost panted it out: “No, it’s all right.”

“That’s what I want to hear,” he said. Or he might have, because he rubbed my clit again, and I could hardly hear him. I gasped, but only once. My eyes were open again, and I stared ahead without seeing the velvet curtains, and the fireglow lights. I couldn’t think, I could only feel what he wanted me to, what I wanted, what I had wanted for years.

“You do understand this won’t be a conventional relationship,” the Inquisitor said, while he kept fucking me. “I’m not exactly the domestic type. But then, you aren’t interested much in true, pure, easy love yourself, _are you_.”

I would have answered him, but that when it was so intense, so brutally intense, I would have come if he hadn’t stopped. My clit was sore and twitching, and I must have moved my hips in a frustrated jerk, because the Inquisitor made me wait before he started again, and his voice was teasing as he said into my hair, into all of Oppelia’s work: “Now, now. Remember not to make too much noise. Be quiet, Brisaé. Be a good girl.”

I nodded. And I was quiet, and I was good, because I knew how to do that. He fucked me, and I was quiet, I bit harder and harder into my lip, and then it happened, the Inquisitor didn’t stop, and I came and came for an endless, clenched moment. I couldn’t see the room, or feel the Inquisitor behind me. There wasn’t room for anything else.

He took his fingers out with a slight, damp pop, and stood up. I closed my eyes as my breathing slowed, and calmed, back to normal. I could smell myself, my cunt, the way I never did when I was by myself. I watched him as he came back around, and my mouth trembled into a tired, good smile.

He crouched down in front of me, and put his hands on my shoulders, and said, so close I could feel the words: “You are a very naughty girl, Brisaé. I approve.”

He kissed me on the mouth for the first, hard and bruising, time. But when I would have pulled him against me and kissed him back again, and again, he wouldn’t let me. He stood up, and: “Don’t be so impatient, Brisaé. You do want something to look forward to. And now I’m afraid I have to excuse myself. I have business elsewhere I must attend to. I do hope you enjoy the rest of the play.”

I was putting my knickers, and my skirts, back in order. “But--”

He stopped at the door and looked down at me. “When you leave the theatre, stop at the ticket desk. The woman there will have my address. You just need to ask if she knows the directions to the Glass Moon. I can assure you she won’t have any questions. And then? Well, that will be entirely up to you.”

Then he was gone. I could hear voices and footsteps on the balconies, so the intermission must have started. I stood up and walked out to get a better view. My legs had a slight, swooning wobble, but otherwise, I felt as I always did. I licked at the marks bitten into my lower lip as I went down to the refreshment bar. I felt slightly disappointed my teeth weren’t sharp enough for them to bleed.

\--

The woman gave at the desk gave me a slip of creamy book paper. She smiled as I took it, and the Inquisitor was right. She didn’t ask me any questions. I waited to read it until I was outside at the airtaxi stand. Then I crossed the square to another station, where I caught one of the last routes. There were only two people near the back, and I sat in one of the first seats. The air was turned up to a blast, and I pulled my coat together. While the airtaxi flew towards it, I took the note out of my purse and unfolded, and read it again. It hadn’t changed. The address, written in shaking, sharp black ink, was still Imperial 500.

I got off a block away from the building. I watched it tower closer as I walked towards it. Most of the floors were dark, but I could see scattered bright windows. I didn’t need to wonder which one of them was his. I was going to find out.

The Inquisitor was waiting for me. I don’t remember knocking on the door, only when he opened it. The city lights glittered in a window in the dark behind him. I don’t know if I moved, or he did, when he pulled me in, and we kissing. When I gasped, his tongue was in my mouth. The automatic door lock clicked into place.

You could say that I look as though my mouth has never been kissed, because it looks like it’s so. I could say that, but it would be a lie.

\--

At the usual time, I had my holocall meeting with the Queen. I sat on the sopha in the sitting room, in my sitting room. I had started to think, and believe, that. The sky was a bright bedsheet blue outside, but it was cold enough that I had turned on the heat. I folded my hands in my lap as the Queen adjusted the connection on her private channel. I wore one of the gowns Caité had chosen for me since she would probably be there. The corset was a new one that breathed with me. I had a new, fat blister rubbed into my left heel, and I had to leave my shoes. The Queen wouldn’t notice that.

The Queen finished with her control buttons, and looked back at me across millions and millions of kilometers. “You look tired, Brisaé.”

“I do?” I said, and shook my head, as though that would truly, and finally, wake me up. It was mid-morning on that side of Coruscant, and I had only been up for an hour. The Queen had told me, since I couldn’t remember, that it was late afternoon in Theed. The sun would have just started to sink down the sky.

“Well, perhaps I am a little tired,” I decided to admit. “I have been busy.”

The Queen smiled, and the red dots on her cheeks moved, before she was serious again. “I know you must be. I do hope you’re doing all right. Are you still having trouble sleeping? I can’t imagine all the traffic noise you have there.”

“Oh, I’ve gotten used to all that, Your Highness,” I said. “You would be surprised at how quickly it happened. I can’t even hear the traffic most of the time.”

I crossed my legs, tighttight with a secret. I don’t need to tell myself what that was, or where I had been the night before, and why I seemed, and was, tired.

The Queen believed me—I could tell because of the way she nodded. Then Caité came in a blur of her red cloak and sat down next to her. They were sitting on the sopha in the Queen’s private sitting room. Caité pushed her hood down, and her pale hair gleamed with electric static. She leaned forward, and though it had to be my imagination, or the connection, her eyes were too dark, and empty, and _cold_.

But she almost giggled when she said: “Oh, you do look tired, Brisaé. I think you’ve been staying up all night. Naughty, naughty.”

“Maybe I have a good reason for that, Caité,” I said.

“You know what she’s there, Caité,” the Queen said. “She’s told me she’s found a way to get close to Inquisitor Mevath. If she’s lucky, he might let something slip--”

“You have to be close to _him_?” Caité said, in a loud, swooning, dramatic voice. “He’s—repulsive! You poor thing. I don’t know how you can bear it.”

_I can because I’m not a silly, weak little girl_ , I thought. But I only smiled at her, at them, and: “It’s actually been much easier than you’d think.”

The Queen nodded with what she probably thought was understanding. “I don’t have to remind you to be careful, Brisaé. Sometimes we have to do things we find distasteful, that we would never have wanted to consider. I’ve had to learn that myself for the first time.”

That made Caité look over at the Queen, and even through the connection I could see she was concerned. She didn’t tell me what she meant, but I could knew something must have happened back on Naboo, and I had several guesses what it could be. I could wait, and eventually, they would tell me about it.

“Yes,” I said. (Later, I would realize my voice was too hard and angry on that word, though they hadn’t noticed.) “Anyhow, I came here for the Queen. I haven’t had the time for anything fun enough to stay up all night for. Sorry to disappoint you, Caité.”

“That isn’t what I’ve heard,” the Queen said.

“I think I’m afraid to ask,” I said.

Caité must have known what she did, because she gave me her worst teasing smile. “Oh, there isn’t anything to be afraid of,” the Queen said. “But I was speaking with Senator Araminta the other day, and her handmaidens told her you’ve started to see someone. They said he’s a Coruscanti political aide, and a nice young man.”

“Well, I’ll admit it then,” I said. “I did meet someone recently--”

“I _knew_ it,” Caité said, and her smile got wider.

“But he isn’t a political aide,” I said. “The Senator’s handmaidens must have gotten that part confused. And it isn’t terribly serious.”

“You don’t have to explain yourself to us,” said the Queen. Her image fluttered like a paper art fan. “I’m sure Captain Bibble would want that, but he doesn’t have to know. I know you’ll always see to your duties first. And that reminds me—You’ve been on Coruscant for over a month now. How much longer do you think you’ll need?

“I don’t know.” And it was, alas and fortunately both, true—I didn’t know. But I didn’t know what I could tell the Queen. “Really, I never thought I would have to be here this long, Your Highness. Things have become—complicated.”

“I understand,” the Queen said. She didn’t suspect anything, or even know she should have. “I don’t think either of us knew what you would be getting into.”

“How has everything been in Theed?” I said.

“Well enough,” the Queen said. (And Caité looked over to see what she was going to say next. I knew that look very well.) “But there have been a few—changes. I’ve had the wording altered on several major buildings. You know how concerned Moff Panaka has been about that for a while now. We spoke recently, and he was quite blunt with me. He said I’ve been drawing more and more attention to Naboo over this. I didn’t want to, but I’ve had to admit he was right.”

Soon, our time would be over, and she would end the transmission. The beads on her headdress shivered, and I wondered if there was any fruit left in the kitchen. I would have to go and see after I closed the connection. And then I would have to prepare to make an appearance with Senator Zevon at the senate. I was not looking forward to that. I knew I wouldn’t hear anything I wanted to know.

“You’ve done well, Brisaé,” the Queen said. “And I am glad you have made your stay more pleasant. I’m sure I couldn’t bear it. But it won’t be too much longer.”

“Yes, Your Highness.” After the call was over, and I was sitting by myself again, I realized I was playing with my ring, a costume piece with a plump amethyst, pushing it up and down on my finger. I wondered if I had started during the call, and if the Queen and Caité had noticed it. And if they had noticed, what they had thought.

\--

Then I went into the kitchen, and stood in front of the refrigerating unit, where I only found a bottle of water and a carton of sugared berries Oppelia had left. I was still relieved, too relieved, that I hadn’t had to lie to the Queen. I had been afraid she would ask the question I could not answer, and I would have to. I shut the unit door, and made a cup of canela tea, and wandered back towards the bedroom. I was still just slightly stiff after spending the night with the Inquisitor, though I didn’t have any bruises I would have to hide. I sipped the hot tea, and looked down on my comm. It lay in the middle of the rumpled sheets where I dropped it. I waited, but it didn’t move.

\--

It has been over a month since I last wrote in this file. I put the datapad inside the bottom desk drawer where I thought I would forget about it. Nothing happened—I just couldn’t see enough of a reason, or a point, to go on writing this. But there never was, which is why I knew where to find the datapad today, and what the file name was. Now I look at the words as I type them, black on the glowing white screen, and it seems like all this happened a long time. It will never be a story I made up, one that I can control, but it was long ago, and far away. It’s all gone now.

I hadn’t thought about Inquisitor Mevath in years when I started on this, though that doesn’t mean I ever forgot him. I mean that I remember him, as I remember (well, almost) everything else. Oh, I know just how much I can trust my memories. I can’t see him clearly, and truly, in my mind anymore. And the Queen, the Queen—

I had to stop again after that. I got up and made a cup of instant mocha, and went on to other things. Now, I wonder if I can finish this story. Maybe I should do that, and lock the file, or delete if I have to, forever. I don’t have anything else planned today (in the rest of the life I have, yes, gone on living). I can sit at my desk under the window and the grey sky outside, and I will write this. Somehow, I am going to get to the end.

\--

Even now, I remember that first time I woke up in bed with the Inquisitor. The room was dark, but I could the fresh sunlight burning behind the curtains on the tall (and one, twenty years before, trendy) windows. I had to blink for a few minutes while I became fully, truly, awake, but I knew where I was. I had turned over onto my back, and I squirmed into a stretch, and tugged the sky grey glimmersilk sheets up around my breasts. The Inquisitor kept his bedroom cooler than I was used to.

Yes, I was naked. I had never slept that way before, but I felt as though I did. The sheets slipped around me, and I could smell my skin, and my animal sweat-smell. I wasn’t sore anymore, though later, I would have beige flower-shadow bruises on my knees, and I could still feel the silk-ropes the Inquisitor had used to tie my wrists together one of the times he had fucked me.

The light was burning the curtains now as the morning went on. I turned my head to look at it, and listen to the empty, silent-ringing rooms out in the apartment.

The Inquisitor was lying on his side, faced away from me. He was still asleep, and I held my breath as I watched him. His hair drifted over his pale back, and he had a dark beauty spot mole near his right shoulder. He didn’t move, and since he was asleep, he looked blank, and trusting, and of all things, _innocent_. I had to turn away.

Yes, I didn’t know how to think about that man. That (Caité still says, and always will, in my memory) monster.

I pushed the sheets back down, and slid off the bed. The floor was heated under my feet, but my nipples was thorn-knots in the otherwise cool air. The bed sighed behind me, and I knew, before I looked, that the Inquisitor was awake. He sat up in bed, his hair in a mused, sleepy mess, but he was awake, and himself again. An autocrono started a loud, frantic beep, beep, beep in the next room.

\--

It was almost morning, and I had just gotten back into my dress. The Inquisitor had suggested I wear this one several days before. It had scratchy embroidered grey roses on the skirts, and a stiff-boned corset so tight I had held my breath when Oppelia had laced it up. The Inquisitor came back into, and I turned around so he could do up the back. My eyelids were heavy, but I still shivered when I felt him touch me as he closed up my dress. A speeder made a buzzed-roar as it raced past too close to the window.

I touched the swollen, cracked sore on the corner of my mouth. Yes, it was similar to the one I had several months ago, and I had just felt it that morning. I had smeared on some mint candy ointment, and hoped it would work soon. The Inquisitor hadn’t said anything, but I didn’t want Uma to notice.

“I should be leaving soon,” I said. But I didn’t go over and pick up my cloak on the chair over in the corner. “The Senator’s handmaiden will coming in a few hours to help me with my hair. She’ll expect me to be there.”

“And you wouldn’t want her to suspect anything, would you, Brisaé,” he said. “She thinks you’re seeing a nice, upper city political aide. He makes sure you get home in time, the way she would want her lover to.”

“That’s all she needs to know.” (And I had to look down at the floor for a blushing, confused, unhappy moment.) “I’m a private person, and for that matter, so is she. And it isn’t as though I’ve done anything to be ashamed of.”

“Do you really believe that?” He walked over to the window, and I could only stand there and watch him as he pulled his hair into a tail. So.

Finally: “You have chosen to keep this relationship a secret, Brisaé. Senator Zevon’s handmaidens believe in a lie because you told them. You’re living that lie, much like Senator Amidala must have done.”

“You’re right,” I said. “Only--”

(Only Amidala could have never had a secret like this. Her lover must have been a well-bred, well-mannered young man from a conservative Naboo--or perhaps Alderaanian or Chandrilan, or even Kekropian--family. I have wondered though that if that were so why she didn’t marry, or at the very least, acknowledge a man like that in some way. That’s something else I will never know.)

“This isn’t what you would have ever expected,” the Inquisitor said, and his voice was almost gentle. It wasn’t a question.

“Maybe not, but I don’t know what else I can do,” I said. “They—wouldn’t understand, and there’s nothing I could say that would make them understand.”

The bed shifted as I down on the edge, and crossed my legs primly together at the ankle, the way the Inquisitor liked. If I left soon, very soon, I would still have a few hours to sleep and look ready and (as my great-aunt would say with a prim, locked diary-pad smile, _proper_ ) when Oppelia came. She would never know. The Inquisitor snapped open his datapad, and scrolled through a file.

“You’re leaving, aren’t you,” I said. 

“I’m afraid so, Brisaé,” he said, still watching the nightlight glow of the text on his screen. “This time, I will probably be away for a fortnight or more. Tiresome, but duty calls, and I must answer. You know how that is.”

“Where are you going?” I said, even though I knew better.

The Inquisitor looked back at me. I could see the text flash as it moved down the screen. “Don’t ask questions you don’t want the answers for. You know what my business is. But I can assure you I’m not being sent to Naboo.”

“I see,” I said, and I did. “And I should leave in the next twenty minutes.”

The Inquisitor hit several keys, and closed the datapad. “There are a few things we could do in that time. You might already know some of them.”

I shut my eyes for a moment for the surprise, for the secret, as he walked back over to me. I let my hands flutter onto the bed. My corset clenched tight as I inhaled, but I remembered how to let that breath out.

\--

I was walking up the street towards the, towards _my_ , building when I saw the man. He looked familiar, but it took me a moment to realize I had seen him before. He was in his mid or late thirties, with curly black hair and brown skin and bruised-bored eyes. He wore a drab, but still well-made, dark cloak. He looked like a businessman, the sort of person no one noticed. But now that the streets were still empty and quiet, aside from the swoosh as the shadow of one of the first airtaxis flew overhead, I did.

The man didn’t seem to have noticed me. ( _Good_ , I would have known without having to think it.) He had just lit up a cigaret, and he sighed out the smoke. He must have just stepped outside for a few minutes. I walked on, and my ears popped with soap bubbles when I swallowed. The building, and the ground floor doors, was just ahead.

“Excuse me, miss,” a man said behind me.

I knew who it had to be before I turned. Perhaps because the building was so close, I was calmer than I might have been. “Yes? Do you need something?”

“My apologies,” he said. “I must have startled you. I just wanted to make sure you made it home safely, Miss Melior.”

He had said my name deliberately, with a purpose, but I only realized that after I was inside. “How do you know my name?”

“I know what I need to.” He came closer, though still at a respecting distance, and lowered his voice, even though we were alone. “Be careful, Miss Melior. You’re an intelligent woman, and you don’t need gossip to figure out certain things. And—let’s just say—there are people in the government who are watching you. And it might not necessarily be for the reasons you would think.”

“Very well,” I said. “I’ll remember to be careful.”

“Good.” He almost smiled before he turned away. I could see him for one more minute in the light from the streetlamp and one of Coruscant’s rust-stained, just full moons. He adjusted his cloak, and that was when I noticed the emblem. It was a lion gold, falcon gold eye that was half-shut, but still watching, still glaring, still knowing. I remembered, for the first time since my training, the logo: _We see in the shadows_. It could only be the signature emblem of Chommell Sector Intelligence.

\--

That was what I remembered when I went to Senator Zevon’s offices the next morning. The doors slid open ahead of me, and the Senator’s personal assistant came past on an errand with a disposable-memo. She nodded, but I hardly noticed her. Senator Zevon was at her desk in the inner room. She stood up when I came in, and her hair burned with sunlight from the window behind her. She had a crystal vase on her desk with several purpleblack roses. They were created by an art botanist, which is why they smelled like, if anything, silk. They might as well have been silk.

“Miss Melior,” she said. “I wasn’t expecting to see you, but I won’t say that I mind. How are you?”

“Fine.” My voice was too fast, and it squeaked up in pitch. That was not good. I touched the stiff sore on my lip with my tongue. “Milady, I’ve a matter that has just come up that I need to discuss with you.”

Her eyes widened, but she composed herself so quickly I wasn’t sure I had seen it. She sat down, slowly, into her chair. “Of course.”

That was when I noticed that a handmaiden, Uma, was right behind her. Well, I should have known she was there, and looked for her. Her purple gown was the same color as the night roses on the desk, as though they had been made from it. She looked serious, and concerned. She never once looked over directly at me.

After I sat down, Senator Zevon leaned over the desk towards me. She had just had sweet lily tea. “Have you heard anything new about Naboo?”

“No, it isn’t that,” I said. “You know that I came to assess matters on the capital for the Queen. It seems Moff Panaka had a similar idea.”

“Panaka has an operative here?”

“He does, Milady,” I said. “I saw him only this morning, and I’m certain it wasn’t by accident. He revealed himself to be because he knows why I’m here.”

“Oh.” Her voice had a slight shake, but she wasn’t surprised. She was quiet then, and I looked around the room, and over at one of the Senator’s art-pieces, a painting of a small white girl, or it may have been a boy, floating in a crowd of trees. It was by an artist from the recent symbolist school, but the girl-boy may have still been some ancient lunar deity. I wouldn’t know. As I wrote some pages ago, my parents didn’t raise us to believe in that sort of thing. They didn’t even think it made very good stories. 

She was still quiet, and I waited before I spoke. I had already gotten into Chommell Intelligence’s files earlier that morning, but there hadn’t been anything to find. They didn’t see fit to save files on their agents, or at least, not electronically.

“Did you know anything about this?” I said.

“Oh, I guessed. Moff Panaka hinted it when he was last here. That was right after the business with Inquisitor Mevath, and it was clear he didn’t trust Apailana to get her shoes buckled up properly.”

“But you know now.”

She looked back at Uma, who slumped her shoulders down and walked away. Then a door whispered shut at the other end of the room. Senator Zevon nodded. “Yes, I know. I have my own sources. And I can tell you that Panaka’s man was instructed to stay deep undercover. He is not to reveal himself to anyone here, or at the Naboo embassy, unless there is an emergency.”

“Then he must know something I should,” my voice said.

“I would imagine he does,” she said.

After a swift, bird-tap knock, the Senator’s assistant came back in. She was about thirty years old, a small woman in a grey watersilk dress with several hairsticks stuck through her chignon. I realize that now, after all the numerous and forgettable times I had seen her, I didn’t even know her name. Perhaps she was another former prodigy who hadn’t made enough of herself in politics. Perhaps she had parents waiting on Naboo for her to return, marry, and stay. Or perhaps none of that is true. She smiled, only showing a flash of her upper teeth.

“Milady,” she said. “Senator Bly is here to see you.”

“Show her in.” Senator Zevon pushed her chair back, and I knew what to do. “I must apologize, Miss Melior, but I have a last minute meeting. Terribly dull, but one must keep the subcommittee pleased.”

“Of course,” I said.

“There is one other thing.” I looked back to see her staring out the window. “His name is Garen Borreno. You know who I mean. I thought you should know.”

“Thank you, Milady.”

Then a woman spoke behind me in a rush of sharp, black thorned words. I recognized it as Kekropian after that first moment, even though I didn’t undertand any of the words. I had chosen it as an elective during the winter term when I was twelve, but I hadn’t studied it since.

Senator Bly followed the assistant into the room. She smiled, even though she looked tired—her eyes were rosepink, and her little fox pawed hand shook on the curved top of her cane. This time, she wore a black velveteen gown, and I thought I heard the bump of her artificial, tin doll’s foot as she walked past. She smelled like sandalwood perfume, and the dusty, theatre curtain sweep of her skirts.

\--

He was waiting in the Senate Plaza. It was a bright, gently warm day, and the plaza was crowded; I don’t think I would have seen him if I hadn’t been looking. He sat off to the side on a white-grey bench that, I knew because I had read the plaque before, made from a now extinct tree on Delaya. He looked like another political aide, or lobbyist, on his break, with his plain suit and expensive, knife-blade comm. He looked up as I came towards me, and smiled, as though he were pleased to see me.

“We need to talk,” I said.

“I would suppose we do,” Garen Borreno said. He moved over, and I sat down and stretched my legs out. The bench was cold from the shade of the building back behind us. The wind came and smacked my hair. It smelled like warm, clean fan air.

We sat there for a few minutes, watching a teacher herd a giggling, rushing group of schoolchildren towards the nearby fountain. They looked about ten years old, in their matching blue uniforms and skinny legs, and of course, they were all humans. They all seemed to shrieked like little birds, and several of them climbed up on the fountain rim, too close to the foaming, silver-tinted water, and waved their arms.

“First, I do apologize for giving you a start last night, Miss Melior,” he said. “But I can assure I would not have made myself known if it hadn’t been necessary.”

I didn’t look away from the sunlight glaring off the water moving in the fountain. The schoolchildren had jumped back down. “Then what do I need to know?”

“There have been several different men keeping watch on Senator Zevon’s residence for over a month now. We haven’t determined which agency they report to yet, though we have our guesses.”

“Does this have anything to do with the Queen?” I said, in the same voice I would have to used to say, _Isn’t the weather lovely today_?

“We assumed that at first,” he said. “Senator Zevon has kept a low profile, which is more than I can say for Queen Apailana. But she’s been seen around lately with this new senator from Kekropia, and that isn’t good. The Kekropians had been too obvious for years, even before they sent this woman who can barely speak Basic.”

“I am aware of that,” I said. “But I don’t know what this has to do with me.”

“Hopefully, nothing,” Agent Borreno said. “But we are here for the same reasons, and I thought you mind find this information useful. And—there is another thing.”

“That would be the reason why you stopped me last night,” I said.

He nodded. “I’m afraid you were being followed back to your building, and I suspect it wasn’t the first time. I had a decent view of the man, and he wasn’t one of the agents we’ve observed before. Whoever he was, he left as soon as I approached you.”

“I didn’t know that.” I looked down at my hands lying in my skirts, which were too hot and smothering in the sunlight. “I didn’t know, and I should have.”

“There’s no need to blame yourself, Miss Melior,” he said. I didn’t look at him, but I still heard the moment of confusion in his voice. “He would have been trained to stay a certain distance away from you, and to blend into the background, and he was quite good at it. And you weren’t trained to recognize this sort of thing.”

Except: I had been trained to do just that. I had been trained to see everything around me, and find the one person in the crowd who was a threat. It didn’t matter that I hadn’t had to put that second bit to use, or that I was pretending to be someone else. I should have, without having to think about it, known.

But Agent Borreno (I must have reminded myself) couldn’t know that. “Of course. It’s just—very upsetting.”

“I understand,” he said. “I’m sorry that I had to tell you.”

Then he said, loud enough for anyone nearby to overhear: “And I am sorry to hear about your Aunt Civé. I only wish there was something I could do.”

“Thank you, _Garen_ ,” I said. “It was very—sudden.” Then I lowered my voice so the wind would blow it away. “They must think I’m involved in something with Senator Zevon, or the Kekropians. That I have information they want.”

“That is a possibility,” he said. “But they will know Queen Apailana sent you, and they will know why, and that will concern them more. I needn’t tell you she has made some poor decisions this year. But that is what happens when a naïve little girl is allowed to run a planet. I can only hope too many people don’t die because of her.”

“That isn’t very Naboo of you,” I said.

“True enough. But I’m not from Naboo.”

I looked at him as though it were the first time. He looked back. I noticed his eyes were so dark they looked black, and that he needed to shave soon. His hair shivered in a slight, playing breeze. He was not a pretty or handsome man, but he wasn’t ugly either. He wore a plain, steady gold marriage band, and he might have been married. But it was more likely that he only wanted to look as though he were.

“I have been there several times on business,” he said. “But I grew up on one of the industrial moons. Let’s just say that its very different from Naboo.”

“I would suppose it is,” I said. “But why are you telling me this?”

“It isn’t a secret,” he said. “Why not? But I should be on my way now. It was a pleasure meeting you, Miss Melior. Perhaps we’ll meet again.”

“Perhaps,” I said.

_Have a nice day_ , I might have told him.

Then he was walking off through the crowds, and I couldn’t see him anymore. I sat there, watching people moving, talking and laughing with easy hahahas, around me. The fountain roared. My comm. buzzed, but it wasn’t an incoming call. I didn’t know what to think, but I wasn’t afraid. I don’t want to believe I was that naïve, but perhaps I still couldn’t believe anything could happen.

When I finally stood up, I went to a popular (and crowded and safe) caf house across the plaza I knew Uma favored. I looked, but I couldn’t see anyone watching me. That didn’t mean they weren’t there, and they hadn’t followed me into the plaza, the same way they had followed me all morning.

\--

That evening, Uma and Oppelia came to help me prepare for a dinner party at the Lis Embassy. Oppelia worked on my hair while Uma slouched and watched in my chair nearby. I wasn’t certain why she had come, and I didn’t ask. She wore a pearl-white Kwilaan dress with a matching papersilk lily inside her braided hair, and her eyes were flushed and glittering. She couldn’t have been more different than she had been earlier in Senator Zevon’s office. Oppelia wasn’t going to the party. She wore a blue dress, and had her hair in a long, swinging rope plain. Her eyes were swollen and damp.

Of course, I had been dressed when they arrived. They would notice something if they saw me naked, especially Oppelia. The Inquisitor used silk blindfold-sashes on my wrists, so I didn’t bruise there, but I had other marks. I had been so eager several nights before that for him to use the crop whip he showed me. They would both wonder, and Uma might even say something—

(I could just see her little smirk: _Someone’s been a naughty girl_.) 

But now Uma only said: “That style looks good with you. Oppelia really does know what she’s doing.”

“Why, thank you, Uma,” said Oppelia. She was almost done, and I could feel the hairpins as she slid them in. “I hadn’t thought you cared.”

“Of course, I do,” said Uma. “That’s why I came to help you.”

“You came because you were bored,” said Oppelia. 

“Well, what did you think.” Uma looked at me, and giggled, yes, giggled. “You do realize, Miss Melior, that Milady doesn’t us to help her get dressed. Soran does that, and he helps her undress as well. I understand he does a good job of it.”

“Uma!” Oppelia frowned, tight and grim and proper, with disapproval, though she still looked as gentle as ever. Oh, I knew how it was. She was the good, sweet girl, which meant that Uma had to be the salty, naughty, blunt one. “I really don’t think that’s--”

“Appropriate?” said Uma. “Oh, please, Oppelia. We’re all grown women here. There’s no need to hide anything.”

She looked down at her purple varnished fingernails, and Oppelia sprayed at my hair with a hiss of glittering stickspray. Now, there was nothing to do until Senator Zevon commed and let me know she was ready to leave. I went over to the window (and if there was anyone watching me, I couldn’t see them). My comm. was still quiet on the vanity, and I didn’t watch. The Inquisitor wasn’t going to call.

He had told me he wouldn’t contact me when he was away on assignment, and he never would. It wasn’t going to light up and start shaking and ringing. It wasn’t.

Oppelia picked up the jar of face powder, and leaned in to brush my face. It should have smelled sweet, but it only smelled like cooking flour. She watched me in the mirror as she put the jar back in its place. “Have you heard who’s going to be there tonight?”

She tried not to sound disappointed, but I could tell she was. I never would know why she wanted, and longed, to go. “I don’t quite remember,” I said.

“The usual people,” Uma said. “Mothma and Organa and that crowd will be good little senators and make their appearances. A few nobles from the homeworld who need to think they’re just that _terribly_ important. You know.”

“That’s all?” said Oppelia. “You haven’t heard any gossip?”

“Oh, all right.” Now, Uma smirked, and Oppelia sighed back. They had their parts, but I didn’t. I could only watch as I went over and clicked on the rose blooming light next to the window. The sky was dark, charcoal smudged grey between the curtains. “Someone did tell me that Lady Ariana Page, Senator Page’s sister, is involved with Inquisitor Mevath. And you know what I mean by that.”

“Oh, thank you for telling us that,” said Oppelia.

Uma shrugged. “You asked.”

I knew what I needed to say. “Perhaps it’s because I’ve seen what he’s really like, but I can’t imagine that sort of thing about him. He’s _so awful_.”

“I can,” Uma said. “He is a man, after all. And he only wants what any other man would. You can understand that.”

“When you put it that way, I suppose I must,” I said.

“Of course, you’re seeing a normal man,” Oppelia said, rushing to reassure me. “I wouldn’t want to know what sorts of things Inquisitor Mevath gets into.”

They didn’t know. They hadn’t any idea. I looked out the window so they wouldn’t see my mouth turn into a smirk. Uma checked her comm., and Oppelia fussed nervously and constantly at the vanity. I waited for my comm. to ring, and watched the reflections of their dark, swishing skirts as they went about their tasks.

\--

Perhaps I was at that party at the Lis Embassy when I first noticed the Imperial Agent, that man I had last seen in Theed. The man who had taken Esteé away. I was standing just behind Senator Zevon, waiting to be called into dinner, when he walked past. It might have taken me a moment, but I recognized him. He wore a black dress uniform and his polished boots, for riding, and kicking, and he had his hair slicked back. His glass-pale eyes were bored and distant. Then he was gone, and I looked back at the Senator. She was talking with the Kuati Ambassador. I’m sure it helped Senator Zevon to be seen with her. Lis was, and I think it still is, one of the most loyal Imperial supporters. It’s a dull, rich Core world known for the library in the capital city that is so exclusive only members of the aristocracy have access, and the ancient hanging gardens.

Of course, I’m sure there has to be more to Lis than just that. There usually is. But you only ever heard those sorts of things about a planet you’ve never seen.

When we were at dinner, I saw him again. He sat just down the table next to the woman I recognized as Lady Ariana Page. She wore Lis pearls over the old pock scars on her face, and copper fingernails. She sipped at her glass of black wine and ignored him, and he ignored her. He wanted to look bored—and it was a dull party.

I didn’t dare to watch them. So I picked at the roast fowl in grey sauce while Senator Zevon talked to her neighbor. Senator Mothma sat across from us, in a jade choker and a sleek cream gown that was the latest thing on Lis. She did have her political career to think of. Senator Danu and his wife sat next to her. Lady Ariana Page would laugh at him on occasion, a high pitched, diamond-glitter hahahaha.

It hasn’t mattered for years, but she had been involved, though briefly, with the Inquisitor the previous year. He must have mentioned it once. They had met at her preferred club in the factory district. Maybe it’s odd, but even then, I wasn’t jealous. I just couldn’t care who he had known, and who he had been with them, when I didn’t know him.

Several days after that, I saw the Agent again near the lifts down the hall from Senator Zevon’s offices. His trendy, silver-blue comm. unit began a high pitched kettle-shriek, and I started. But he didn’t notice me, even when I walked past him.

It did occur to me to mention him to the Queen, but I didn’t. I might have told Agent Borreno that first night, but I didn’t know how to contact him. But I wasn’t sure what I could tell them. He was too high ranking to be the man Borreno had seen following me, though he might have given the orders. But those were guesses, educated as they were.

Then: I didn’t see him again. I looked for him, but he wasn’t at the opening reception at the opera I attended with Senator Zevon and Soran Hume, or at Senator Mothma’s exclusive philosophical evening. Uma mentioned once, when she was teasing Oppelia, that Lady Ariana Page had a new lover. Now I thought it had been a coincidence when I saw him at the party. (And it is likely that was all it was.) I forgot about him—

And I had to stop writing there. I used the excuse to get up and stretch, and look outside at the field. The sky had dissolved into a soft curtain of snow. I haven’t been outside today, and so I didn’t realize it was that cold. I waited to come back to this when I knew I wouldn’t make an attempt at an excuse.

Oh, it wouldn’t have changed anything that happened if I had looked for him. I can accept that. It may have even made matters worse. But I shouldn’t have forgotten him.

\--

Lately, I keep thinking of what happened to Esteé at that stained-white ghost mansion in the mountains. I imagine the closed dark rooms, the staircase, and the locked door of the room where the Agent and yes, the Inquisitor had taken her. There would have been two stormtroopers stationed just outside in the hall. I know. Just as I know that inside Esteé was strapped into a plain, bony wooden chair. Her hair had been done up in a knot that morning, to match the rest of us, but it would have come loose and tangled after a while, when she was warm and steaming-damp with sweat.

Imperial Intelligence prefers droids for interrogation, but the Agent would have administered the torture drug himself through a long, drooling tipped needle. It would have started as a pinch, a tiny sugarfly bite, in her upper arm. She would have cringed, and clenched her eyes shut, from the Agent’s close, dragon-warm breath.

_Now, be a good girl_. Tell us what we want to know, he would have said.

Or the Inquisitor said.

(Perhaps he stepped back and watched the Agent work. Or he might have rolled up his sleeves before he prepared the needle. I can see that. The hairs on his arms would be straw-glinting in the light from swaying, overhead fixture. Esteé would have watched him as he came over to her, moon-eyed with fear, but still, and always, silent.)

Esteé would have clenched her teeth together as she shook and jerked, and her eyes rolled back, with the pain, but she wouldn’t have screamed. They wouldn’t have allowed her to sleep, so after the first night, she would have been confused, and she wouldn’t think, or see, quickly and well enough. The Agent might have offered her a glass of water. But she would have jerked her head away to the side.

It wasn’t that white, shining white conference room at Imperial Intelligence headquarters, the place I have to remember. There was a wooden chair from a kitchen or a schoolroom, with buckled leather straps hanging from the arm rests, at the table. A camera hung overhead watching, and worse-- _knowing_ everything. No, that hadn’t happened. I have to remind myself of that.

\--

The Inquisitor returned to Coruscant several days earlier. I found out when I checked my comm. to see if Senator Zevon had called, and there a chrono ticktick announcing a missed call on my secured line. It was so silly, but I almost dropped the comm. I had to sit down, flushed and shivering-nervous, before I could click the screen off. The only sound was the fan working in the air circulator. Slowly, and carefully, I shut the comm. down. He would call me again--probably not that day, but soon. I could have contacted him, but I wouldn’t. He had never told me, or ordered me, not to, but I wanted, and needed, to wait for him. He would have known that.

He was back, with his autocratic black boots for kicking, and his smirk for kissing. He would choke me. He would make me, and he would destroy me.

I fell back onto the couch, and the skirts of my new gown spread out around me. It had just arrived with the last embassy ship from Naboo. It was purple with faint, nighttime lotuses—the Queen’s symbol—embroidered on the bodice, and there were little mirror bits scattered all over the skirts. It would be difficult to get back out of it, but it hardly be impossible. Oh, I could feel my mouth move into a smirk.

I lay there for a few more minutes. Senator Zevon was expecting me to meet her soon for luncheon. I was not looking forward to it, though the food would be good. The Senator and her colleagues only ate the most exclusive, and human only, restaurants. I only had to sit there while they talked in earnest, important, whispering voices, and occasionally nod with approving and understanding. I looked serious, but that was because I was bored. I wouldn’t remember what they said even moments later.

Perhaps I should mention at this point (in the event anyone else somehow reads this, and needs to know) that I’d never had much interest in politics. I only knew what I needed to—and that wasn’t, really and truly, very much. We never assisted the Queen with matters of state. She had her aides, and their aides, for that. And my family has never been too involved in politics, even before my mother was passed over for a position on Amidala’s Advisory Council. She was more than qualified, but she was married with children, and three small, adorable, grubby, rose-cheeked ones at that. Erised was nineteen, and finishing up at university, so she wouldn’t have counted. My youngest sister Quintana and my brother Bale hadn’t been born yet.

Because, as she told my father, and my aunt and uncle, when we were on holiday at our mountain estate: _The position needed to go to someone who had nothing else to do with themselves than answer the beck and call of Naboo_.

I don’t know why I remember that: how I came downstairs for a glass of rubyfruit juice and overheard them talking in the parlour. She had received the news only several days before we left and her voice twisted before she laughed with a gasping hahaha. I had never heard her sound like that before, and I never would again.

Perhaps I hadn’t thought about politics enough to have an opinion. But now, after all those meetings, dinner parties, and senate sessions, I had. And I loathed them. Politics had been useless enough on Naboo; the government worked so well the people, the masses, cared more about what the Queen wore than anything she said in her occasional speeches. (And I can assume it’s the same with the current queen, Kylantha.) But it was different on Coruscant. Their politics were a game, and they were _real_.

Anyhow: I tried not to think about all that too much. I couldn’t get out of the luncheon, but it wouldn’t last long, and then it would be in the past.

I stood up, and my skirts shifted like leaves or paper pages inside an old book, and went back to the bedroom for my datapad. There was just enough time to read another chapter in the novel I had started the night before.

\--

He was standing by the window, looking out at the sky, when I came into his office. The only light came from the lamp in the corner behind the dark leather sopha, and the nightlight glow from his shelf of holobooks. I had never read, or even looked through, one of them; I wasn’t there for that. He waited until I was only feet away before he turned around. He had his hair pulled back with a bloodred ribbon, and his eyepiece gleamed. The automatic lock on the door clicked into place. I think I smiled, but only for that instant, before I pressed my mouth together and arranged my hands at my waist.

He had left his datapad open on his desk, and his cloak was folded over the back of the chair. I couldn’t tell how long he had been there. The sky behind him was full of the glowing, moving stars of speeder lights.

He wore the plain silver ring I had seen once before, and his fingernails had grown. But they weren’t too claw-sharp, and it wouldn’t hurt more than I wanted, than I could imagine, than I could bear, when he—

Already, I was damp between my legs.

“Well, well, Brisaé,” he said. “You seem excited to see me.”

“Perhaps I am.” I took off my cloak and arranged it in a fainted heap at the end of the sopha. The mirrors on my skirt shivered with light.

Oh, he knew. He twitched his mouth as I came over to him. The room was so quiet the air seemed to swell between us, and then he kissed me, hard, sucking and then biting down into my lower lip. I kissed him back, the pain on my lip already faded as I pushed my tongued into his mouth, and my breathing panted in my ears. Then he stepped away, and went back behind his desk. He hadn’t even touched me.

But he would. I watched as he closed his datapad, the sleep-light reflected in his eyepiece. I knew what it meant when he wore that.

“Tell me,” he said, as he came back around the desk. “Were you a good girl while I was away?”

“No,” I said. I looked down at the floor, and the plush Nubian rug with a pattern of twisting, snake-tongued flowers that reminded me of the rug in the senior parlour at my secondary school. I had most of my hair loose, and I let it fall over my face, though I didn’t dare to smile. He would know; _I wanted him to know_. I couldn’t feel his teethmarks in my lip anymore. “I’m afraid I wasn’t.”

The Inquisitor sighed just behind me. “What did you do?”

“Oh.” That time, I allowed my mouth to move into a smile. I pushed my warm, slippery hair from my face, and looked straight ahead, and: “I had my scheduled meeting with the Queen last week, and I didn’t want to talk to her. I had one of Senator Zevon’s handmaidens cancel for me. I think I told her I wasn’t well, and then I read a novel, and went out to one of the teashops.”

Before, I had told him I hadn’t worn knickers to a senate session, even though I always wore knickers, and he knew that. But this time, I was telling him the truth. I wanted to be punished, and to enjoy it, for something I had actually done.

“I see,” the Inquisitor said. He touched the small of my back. “I’m afraid I can’t leave the office tonight. I still have some follow up reports I need to attend to.”

“I understand, _milord_ ,” I said.

He moved his hand away. “I thought you would. Now, you know what to do.”

I turned and leaned over the desk, my arms pressed down, and my hands spread out. He walked around me, and I pushed my arse up, higher and teasing, in the air. He cupped it, so lightly and gently I hardly felt it, and paused. Then he spanked me, with a loud, hard smack, and I lurched forward. Before I could stop it, I gasped out. But he had already spanked me again, and then again. My hips bumped against the edge of the desk, and I squeaked through my teeth.

He stopped, and then he said, his breath warm next to my ear: “You don’t have to be quiet this time, Brisaé. No one else can hear you.”

He spanked me again, and my eyes blurred with tears. I breathed with my mouth open, but I couldn’t make a sound. “I want you to cry out,” his voice said, as he gave me another smack. “I want you to tell me how you feel.”

“Yes,” I said in a loud, panting voice. My hair hung over my face. When he spanked me again, I shook forward against the desk, and grunted. He spanked me again, and this time, I did cry out, a deathbird flapping noise. _Yes_.

“Good,” he said, or I thought he said. 

“That’s what I wanted to hear,” I know he said.

He pushed his knee against my legs, and I was down on the desk, my face pressed into my hair, as he spanked harder, so hard my teeth shook. My face was slick with tears by then, but I didn’t want him to stop. And: I whimpered, I cried out, and finally, when I could feel the slaps, but not his hand, I only moaned. I don’t know when he stopped, only when I felt him lean against me, and comb his fingers through my hair. I could still feel the echo-pain of the smacks in my thighs.

He sounded as calm, as controlled, as ever when he said: “You were good, Brisaé. A very, very good girl.”

He gave my hair a tug, and I stood up again. My legs shivered, and I had to wipe at my nose. My face was damp with sleek, glassy tears. He kissed my cheek, and slid his hand down my back, and my clit twitched. I waited to know what he wanted next.

\--

The cleaning droid was murmuring through the hallway later, as I lay on the sopha wrapped in my cloak. I had my head rested on the Inquisitor’s thighs, and he stroked my hair, slowly, absently. I shut my eyes. I was still sore, and I was sure I would bruise. But it was fading away, and I stretched my legs out. The cloak was tugged up around my knees, and the leather was smooth-soft against my skin. I was still damp between my legs, but for the night, or at least the moment, I was content.

The Inquisitor tugged on a handful of my hair, and let it go. I opened my eyes, and turned so I could look up at him. His hair was loose, and his mouth was stained a blush-red. He had taken his eyepiece earlier after he had finished his work, the scrolling, greenlight letters on the datapad I knew enough of not to read.

The curtains, the dark curtains from a holotheatre, sighed from the air vent just under the window. The cleaning droid’s sounds had moved on.

I should say that earlier, when he saw I had been crying, he leaned close and kissed my face, kissed it all clean, kissed it away.

It doesn’t change anything, but I don’t have to remind myself (in this story, in my only and secret confession) of the information on that datapad. Or the moment when I was reading on the sopha in my dressing gown and heard the Queen’s incoming signal in the next room—when I felt, before I could deny it and lie, a flash of clenched-teeth annoyance. I’m not likely to forget any of it.

And the next morning, I twisted around in front of the fresher mirror after I showered and saw that yes, I had smacked bruises on my arse. I smiled, because of that, and because that night, that once, I had marked him as well—

\--

I don’t know if I can write about what happened next. I would prefer to stop this story in that moment, while I stood in front of the mirror, and actually smiled. I did stop there and close the file over a year ago now. I only opened it again last night when I couldn’t sleep. I came into the parlour with a cup of spiced chocolate, and I thought I could try to manage it. And (I think I can say, hours later) I must have. So I will think about it—how only days, not even a week, later, I was at the Senator’s offices when a man came in. A man in the dull, pine needle green uniform of Imperial Intelligence.

He wore glasses with black lenses. I never did see his eyes, and I’ve wondered since then if he wanted it that way. Senator Zevon’s assistant stepped out of his way when she saw who he was. The other aides watched her, and they watched (nervously, with whispering, hopeless smiles) him. The air was heavy and slick as glass.

I had only stopped in for a few minutes to see Senator Zevon, before I went to lunch in the senate cafeteria. They could have so easily missed me.

The Senator stood up at her desk, but he didn’t even see her. He looked at me before he said, in a strange, fursoft voice: “Catriona Melior?”

Catriona is my first, birth name, the one I haven’t used since I was fifteen years old. I do remember that people hadn’t approved of it when my mother named me--it was too long, too dramatic, a name that should only belong to a queen. I never used a nickname or a diminutive either; I went by the full name until I picked my next one.

The others all watched me, but then, he had already known who I was. “Miss Melior. You need to come with us.”

When I didn’t move, he nodded at a female officer who had just come in behind him, and she took my elbow. I saw her hand, but I couldn’t feel it. She had large, hazel-brown eyes, and she didn’t seem to quite look at me or anything else. She gave me a tug, but I could only see Senator Zevon and her aides, staring at me with large, doll-blank, _stupid_ eyes, their faces pale as holonet fuzz.  
\--

They all watched as the officers led me away. Everyone watched as went down the busy hallway to the lift, and then through the rest of the building. They would stare—nervous, but still curious and yes, even relieved—before they looked away. They stared at me. I should have been humiliated—and later, when it was over, I was. But I couldn’t feel anything. I was numbed and swollen-soft, as though I were walking on stuffed doll legs. I must have gone on breathing, but I didn’t feel it. Then we were out in the street, in the pale, clean sunlight, and there was a closed speeder with tinted windows.

The woman was actually gentle when she pushed my head down as she put me into the speeder. I suppose that was the reason they had sent her.

The speeder started forward with a slam, with a punch, and I lurched forward in my seat. The woman didn’t appear to notice. Several fast, shaking minutes later, they led me through the corridors of Imperial Intelligence. A ratdroid went shooting past my feet, and I tried, in a dazed, glass-smashed way, to think, to know what to do. They took me—no, I went with them, I had accepted that much—up in a lift, and then down a narrow, shadow-grey hallway. The man unlocked a smooth, beige, bone-pale door.

They brought me into the white room. It had white walls, and white, snowsoft light from an overhead light fixture that gave off a buzzing, bugkill snap. There was a plain wooden chair set in front of a dining table. I saw it, and then I saw the leather straps, with drooling loose metal buckles, that hung from the armrests—

“You should sit down, Miss Melior,” the man said. “Our superior won’t be here for another few minutes.”

He said it as though I had the option to do otherwise, to continue to stand there, but I knew not to believe that. He wasn’t asking, he was telling me. I sat down on the edge of the wooden chair. That was when I noticed the camera perched overhead in the corner, the lens turned, like a glossy bird eye, directly on the chair, and on me. I looked away. The man had gone back into the hallway, but the woman stayed by the door.

I heard his voice before I saw him. Then there was a series of clicks at the door lock, and the Agent, the officer I had first seen on Naboo, came in. His hair was slicked back, and he had his boots polished to a mirror-reflecting glare. He had a tight little rosebud mouth, and (I had to notice then, at the worst possible time) he was short. The woman was several obvious inches taller than he was.

He gave her a curt snap of a nod she seemed to understand. She remained at her post as he came over and looked at me. He didn’t seem to mind when I looked back. I clutched the arm rests, my hands stickywarm with sweat, and he stood there and watched me. The woman looked straight ahead. Finally, he decided to speak:

“I do hope my agents have made you comfortable, Miss Melior.” He tried to sound as though he meant it, but I knew enough not to respond. I swallowed some cold, melted-ice spit, and was almost surprised my throat still worked.

“We just have to ask you a few questions,” he said. “The answers, however, will be extremely important, so keep that in mind.”

“What do you want?” I said. I could tell even then it wasn’t wise to say anything, but my voice was soft and limp—anything but arrogant or _spunky_.

He was going to tell me something, the latest news, about Jedi on Naboo, and ask me what I knew about it. (And I knew little enough—the girl I had seen must have disappeared into the shadows weeks and even months before.)

Or no: he was going to ask me what I knew about the Kekropian senator, and what she might have said to Senator Zevon. (Then I could tell him—and it would be the truth no matter what he wanted—that I didn’t know anything.)

“It’s quite simple.” He leaned his hip against the table, and looked up at the camera on the ceiling. “We found the transmissions Lisandra Gaunt sent through your net address. Sadly, they had already been corrupted, and our slicers were unable to salvage the data. I want you to help us, and tell me what you know of their plans.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” I said.

“Don’t play stupid,” he said, looking down at me. “It doesn’t become you, and it annoys me. You know what I mean.”

“But I don’t,” I said. “I’ve never even heard of Lisandra Gaunt, and if she used my net address, I wasn’t aware of it.”

“But I think you were.” He shook his head, with a small, almost sad sigh. “Miss Melior, _Catriona_. I had thought you would be so much more tractable than this. Actually, considering what I’ve heard of your tastes, I would have expected you to have offered, even _begged_ , to suck me off by now.”

The woman remained silent, but her eyes widened with shock and yes, sympathy. He smiled, and she looked away. “Of course, I never said that.”

“Miss Melior,” he said, and there was a slight whipflick to his voice then. “Lady Gaunt is a Belleri socialite known to be associated with a terrorist ring that has recently developed delusions of expansion. But you know this—unless she’s told you something else you found more to your liking.”

“I don’t wish to be difficult,” I said, my voice clenched so tight I could hardly speak. He arched his eyebrows. “But I can’t help you. I have never met this woman, and I hadn’t even heard of this group until you mentioned it.”

“You don’t know anything about them,” he said.

“Well, I did hear about a movement in the Belleri capital to abolish the monarchy. It was just something I saw on the holonews, and it didn’t mean--”

“That little rebellion doesn’t concern us,” he said. “The nobles are the ones who truly run that rock, and they answer to the Empire. But Lady Gaunt is interested in the bigger picture, and she has connections and credits—a great deal of them. That does concern us, and I’m sure it was what must have interested you.”

“It doesn’t,” I said, even as I could tell it hadn’t done me any good. “I’m sorry. But I’m not involved with this group, and I don’t know anything about them.”

“Then I’m sorry I have to do this.” He murmured into his comm., and the door slid open. The other man (and did he have pearl-white eyes, or cat eyes, or eyes with long goat pupils behind his glasses) was there with a small cloth bundle. I watched them while the woman came over and her fingers snapped as she lifted my right arm and fussed with my sleeve. She let it go, and strapped me into the chair. She cinched the leather belts tightly, too tightly, around my forearms ( _like a canine choke-collar_ , I want to say). I wonder now if she regretted that instant she had felt for me.

“Thank you,” the Agent said as the door clicked shut. He set the packet down on the table and went to work. “I know it’s the thing to use droids, but I’ve always preferred to handle this aspect of interrogation myself. It’s the only way to have it done properly.”

And he held up the needle and checked the glimmering-pink stuff inside, one drop gleaming at the tip. He paused and I thought (I actually--for one cringing, useless, moment--thought) he was going to give me my last chance. But instead he came over to the chair, and his breath was too close and dampwarm by my ear as he said: “It’s time for you to cooperate with us, _Catriona_.”

I only felt a sugarfly sting-bite as he pricked the needle into my arm, and pushed the plunger. Then he stepped back. “How many times has Lisandra Gaunt contacted you?”

“She never has,” I said. “I had never heard of her before--”

“I’m growing tired of hearing that,” the Agent said. (I was becoming stiff, the muscles in my legs turning into wood, as the drug started to work.) “Let me try this again: how many times has Lisandra Gaunt made contact with you?”

“She hasn’t,” I said, and my voice was a little, teakettle shriek as the first, rolling pains clutched me. “I told you, _she never has_.”

“Fine.” He paced around behind me, until he was only the dark blur of his uniform and the clickclick of his boot heels. “How did she first introduce herself?”

“I haven’t had anything to do with this woman!” The chair legs wobbled with me (and I felt the little feet bump against the floor) as I shook and jerked about with the pain, as it grew and throbbed and stayed. “ _I don’t know her_.”

“Then how do you explain the files we found at your net address?” he said, and his voice had started to fade.

“I can’t,” I said, though my teeth were clenched so tightly I don’t know how I managed to. “She must—She must be using random people—as covers--”

“I don’t think I need you to do my job for me, _Catriona_.” His footsteps came back around the table. “You don’t seem to be enjoying this. Odd. I was under the impression that you fancied this sort of thing.”

I couldn’t have said anything to him even if I had wanted to: that was when I had another, rushing attack of pain. He was still talking, but his voice was a background fan-roar. When the pain slowed, his voice was still there: “—tolerate this sort of thinking, from anyone. I would expect you to understand that.”

I still don’t know what he was talking about, though I have guessed. “I can’t tell you what you want to know.”

“You will.” I wonder if he gave me a pinched little smirk as he said that, or if he remained serious. “Oh, you will. This isn’t going to end until you do.”

After a while, his voice became a constant, endless litany: _Tell me. I know you know, so tell me. Tell me tell me tell me_.

And I did want to tell him—only I couldn’t think (my brain flashed, and my skin burned and glowed with the pain) well enough to know what to say. I only knew that I had to, and (while the door opened, and a protocol droid stood there and gleamed, and I saw the woman again as she went over and her mouth moved while she spoke to it. That is one of the few things I can remember) _soon_.

I don’t know how long it was before I cracked. I sniffled, swallowing down a silky mess of snot, and said: “All right. I’ll tell you.”

“So you’ve finally had enough.” The Agent sounded pleased. He came back to the table and leaned towards me. I stared at his pale eyes, at the tiny blackhole pupils. They looked as though they were made of plexiglass. And I could just see the moist, eyelash-tiny hairs in his nostrils. He glared at me, and I told him.

I made it all up on the spot, in a stumbling, nervous rush. I told him Lady Gaunt had first approached me at The Enigma, an underground club. She had seemed drunk in a silly, innocent way, but—I decided to emphasize—it was only an act. She left her group of friends, and sat next to me at the bar. She wore a cream silk dress with a peek-a-boo bodice. (The Agent must have told me at that point not to digress.) She told me her people were being oppressed—and that I could help her.

“She must have known I’m from Naboo.” I shook my head. My hair had come loose and fallen into my face, and my mouth. “That I would be impressed if I thought she was this great, selfless freedom fighter like Amidala was.”

“Amidala was an idiot,” the Agent said. “But it seems she knew her target.”

I went on to tell him that I had allowed her to pass certain files through my net address, and I had set up the corruption virus myself with the computer skills I did not actually possess. I had only spoken with her in person several more times, including once in a fem fresher at the senate. I gave her a password-protected disc the last time, only when a week before, when she told me she was returning to her homeworld.

I had never been to The Enigma, though I had seen pictures on the holonews. I didn’t know that Lady Gaunt was well into her forties—a large, severely handsome woman who liked her gin and her opera—and not the girl I had imagined. The Agent had to have known that, but he nodded as though he believed every word.

“That’s good,” he said. “Now, you need to tell me the rest of it.”

“The rest?” I could hardly remember what I had told him so far, as though the words vanished as soon as I had said them.

“You know exactly what I mean,” he said. “That can’t be all. And--”

There was a flash-beep at the door. I heard a man’s voice, and then the furry voice of the male officer. The door slid open, and he came in. “I apologize for interrupting you, sir. But he insisted on seeing you straight away--”

“Thank you, Lieutenant Gish,” Garen Borreno said as he moved past him. The officer, _Lieutenant Gish_ , retreated back to the hallway. Agent Borreno wore a blaster-black uniform with several rank bars. I haven’t seen that particular uniform since, but it must have been from a high ranking branch in Intelligence.

I could tell that right away, because the Agent changed—he stepped forward, and clicked his back stiffly into attention. “May I be of some assistance, sir?”

“You may,” Agent Borreno said. “I need to take Miss Melior here with me. I see that she has endured your attentions quite long enough.”

The Agent started to speak, but Borreno smoothly, calmly interrupted him before he could go on. “You couldn’t have known she was working for us. You were only doing your job. I’m sure you would have consulted with us first had you known.”

“Of course, sir,” the Agent said. “Miss Melior is free to go. I was just about finished with her, anyway--”

Garen Borreno had the woman undo the straps; my arms were limp and loose with sand, but free. I was so weak my legs wobbled when I tried to stand up, and I had to clutch at the sweaty-warm back of that chair. And even worse—I had wet myself. Only a little, but enough so the back of my skirts were damp, and I smelled. The room blurred into white light, and I breathed in damp, panting gasps. Agent Borreno looked away while I made an attempt to straighten myself up. He took my arm, as though we were walking into one of the royal midsummer balls, and we left that room.

Once we were outside the building, he said: “I know this is little enough, but I am sorry about what you went through, Miss Melior.”

“Don’t be,” I said, the words heavy and round as stones.

I could only remember that moment in Senator Zevon’s office when the door opened, and Lieutenant Gish came in. How I had turned with a slight, daydreaming smile, an _actual smile_ , to see him. I wasn’t wanted at any meetings or sessions, so I had been thinking about visiting one of the nearby nature sanctuaries. I hadn’t seen it coming

\--

The Inquisitor came to see me at Senator Zevon’s apartment. She was gone for the day, and I’m sure he knew that. I had gone out onto the balcony, and I stood near the fountain (with the whispering-soft, diamond water I had noticed for the first time in weeks) and watched his speeder pull up. It floated by the edge as he got out, and I could see the silver necklace glint of the droid driver. He wore a plain dark suit with a tiny starviolet on the lapel, and it somehow made him look younger. I had never seen him like that before, and I wondered later if I had seen who he had once been.

I don’t know what he saw when he looked at me. I hoped I looked normal, and _all right_ , but when I looked in the mirror in the guest fresher, I couldn’t see myself at all. Only a cold, silent, huge black hole.

I knew I ought to say something so: “I didn’t expect to see you.”

That was obvious and trite, but the Inquisitor (and yes, I will write it) kindly did not seem to notice. “I had a few free moments.”

I left the fountain to walk out towards him. The sky was that pale, bleached blue, with a few smeared clouds above the buildings. It looked as though it belonged in another story, a far happier one. I stopped several feet away from him. The fountain moved behind us, and I clenched my toes and pressed my feet against the floor.

I did consider asking him in for a drink, but I couldn’t find the words to use to phrase it. I still think that he would have only found a polite way to refuse.

Then he said, in voice I had never heard from him: “I want you to know I was not involved with what happened to you, Brisaé. And I have spoken to Agent Ford--” (That wasn’t the Agent’s actual name, but since I never have remembered it, that is close enough.) “I can assure you he didn’t enjoy it.”

“I never thought you were.” I forced my mouth into a smile that was amused with the nasty, sneering understanding I had learned. “You would have done a better job of it. You would have certainly known what I’m guilty of.”

“I should hope so,” the Inquisitor said. “But I don’t want to go on about that. I’ve heard you’re returning to Naboo.”

“The Queen insisted on it,” I said in a quick, dove-wing beating rush. I didn’t want to talk about it. “Really, I’m surprised she let me stay this long.”

I wasn’t as tired as I had been the first few days after the interrogation, when I had fallen—almost literally—inside the dark room of sleep for hours. But I still had to go over and sit down on the sopha just behind the fountain. My head buzzed with radio static, but I still heard him come in. I smoothed my skirts out. The buzzing faded, but I still felt odd, and bruised, and weak. He stood just behind the sopha, where he was a blur in the edge of my eye. I didn’t dare look directly at him in that state.

“I don’t suppose we have anything else to talk about,” I said.

“I suppose not.” He waited for one last, hesitant moment before he said: “It only has to mean something if you want to it, Brisaé. And--that wouldn’t be so wrong.” 

I wonder now if I couldn’t see him when he was no longer the monster I had dreamt about, the monster he must have known I wanted him to be.

He never said that he loved me, and he didn’t love me.

But I know, considering what would happen later, that he must have felt something for me. I might not have a name for it, but he did.

After he left, I went back to the guest bedroom, and the mattress made a rowboat creak as I lay down on top of the purple silk bedspread. I stared up at the ceiling, as I had for hours that morning, and the night before. I never saw him again.

\--

Senator Zevon had received a summons from the Emperor while I was still being interrogated. Or really and honestly—though I hadn’t allowed myself to think of it that way yet—tortured. I’m just as glad I don’t know how that went. The Emperor had not been pleased to learn that Intelligence had brought in one of her staff members. Yes, that was how he referred to me—I was so far beneath his notice, he never even knew my name. I’m sure it was in the memo, but it was only a holobulb flash as he deleted it.

I will say that the Senator never pushed me to tell her about what happened. She might have resented most of the rules we were both raised with, but she still knew to respect my privacy. It’s obvious I returned the courtesy.

She had her assistant take care of my apartment. Several of the guards helped Uma and Oppelia bring my belongings down to the guest room. She even spoke to the Queen for me that first night while I was sleeping. She listened while the Queen said, her image fluttering on the holostand: _I’m sure she will want to come home now_.

The Senator told me the next morning as we sat at the dining table in the bright, yawning sunlight. “She wants you to come back.”

And I knew Agent Borreno had already left on one of the big transports. His assignment was over, and he had returned to being anonymous. I looked at the huge sky outside the window, and picked at a piece of sugar-gritty fruit. The Senator turned her attention back to her cup of spaceblack caf and the memo that glowed on her datapad.

\--

I returned to Naboo on an Nubian yacht Amidala had used during the first years of the Clone Wars. Senator Zevon did not have the clearance to use it, but then, I doubt she would have wanted it. The chrome skin had dulled after years in the Naboo Embassy hangar, but it was still the ship meant only for royalty. I don’t know anything about starships, but I could tell it still worked smoothly, and _perfectly_. The pilot from the Embassy patted its side, as though it were a huge, tamed wulf, as I came across the landing pad with my luggage to board.

I would only see her several times during the trip. I tried to speak to her in the staff lounge once, and it went badly. She stayed in the cockpit, and I was on the lower level in the bedroom with its smooth silver walls and wide bed. The bed would have been hers, though the white silk sheets had to be new.

I knew because I could smell the warehouse storage box on them during the hours I lay there, listening to myself breathe.

I never dreamt about the interrogation. Dreams—or at least, as I know them—don’t work that way. I did dream once, and only once, that I was sneaking down a back staircase in a huge, dingy, shadow-blurred building; I had to hurry, or someone (I must have known who it was, though I wouldn’t when I woke up) would find me. But that was almost a year later, and I haven’t seen that place in my dreams again.

While the ship floated through the ghost-light of hyperspace (and outside that, the blacknothing of space) I turned twenty.

I sat in the middle of the bed while the chrono tickticked. It was early evening in Theed, when the sun bruises the sky blue, and the trees are black. (Of course, it looks just like that on the world, or at least the town, where I live now.) I had been working on a logic puzzle, but I finally stopped trying to be interested in it. I had turned on some music, but I had ceased to hear it. I stared, my eyes wide open, because of the pressure, as though I had hard, doll-fisted pearls stuffed in behind them.

And I felt the first plump, raindrop tears slide down my cheeks. I wiped at my nose, but I went on crying. I was too tired to fight it off.

I should have. It isn’t just that crying is considered weak and childish on Naboo; no, far worse, it’s _selfish_. Because you’re thinking on your problems, instead of those of other people. My parents always told us that wasn’t so, and my mother may have even said it was the sign of a sensitive, and sane, nature, but we never believed them.

After all, everyone else thought differently. I still believe it’s wrong to cry, even in private, and I suppose at this point I always will.

But no one was there to see me—or read about it here, years later—and I managed to calm down. My breathing stumbled, and my face was swollen and my eyes itched with sand. I changed the music to a louder, heartbeat-throb techno piece, and looked through my datapad for something, anything, to read. I never did finish that logic puzzle.

\--

Last night, I went to the carnival at a field several kilometers outside town. I had only seen it before when I drove past in my new land vehicle, but up close, it’s huge, spreading out to the hunched shadows of the nearby hills. The grass looks smooth, but up close, I saw it actually grows in clumps. They had set up a huge blue cloth tent, and firebug lights floated through the air. (They tended to come too close to one’s face—I had to swat at a few of them, and I saw other people do the same.) The rides swirled behind the tent, and I could smell greasy meat and candy from the food stalls.

It’s the beginning, the first days, of autumn, and though the weather is still warm during the day, it’s much cooler at night. They had to set up heaters by the stalls.

I wandered around, stopping when I saw someone I knew, or they saw me. I got in one of the food lines, and bought a chocolate caf in a clear glass. I watched the rides while I drank it. The people inside them gave occasional, flapping shrieks, the sort that must have meant they were having fun.

They were having fun at the tent as well. Several girls in lumbering, rusted-old ground tanks rammed at each other just outside it, while the men, and only men, watched and occasionally made sharp, flirting whistles. You would never see that on Naboo. Then the tanks stopped like worn-down dragons, and the girls were laughing and flushed as they climbed, only slightly stumbling and whisperkit-legged, out.

One of them shook her hair. It was wild and curly and mostly brown with lavender and sky-green and cream streaks. She wore a thin white camisole with ribbon straps, and her skin seemed to burn with the cold air. She linked arms with one of the other two girls, and before I left, I think I heard her voice.

_I don’t need to win_ , she might have called back to the men, while she pulled her camisole strap back up her cold-smoothed shoulder.

I walked past the rides and on through the field, and stopped to look up at the hills and the ragged, stunted fringe of trees along the tops. I wondered how tall they actually are. The knife-curve of one of the moons floated close above them. I know that is only an illusion, even if I don’t know how it works. And it does work. It was the bone-white moon the people here call Else, the largest and easiest to see.

The last few days have been bad ones, the sort where I feel raw and anxious all the time, my head full of jumbled glass shards. It has been over ten years since I left Naboo, and I think this is the first time I’ve managed to write even that much down. I don’t think I can write the rest—at least, not now. But I was lucky this time, and I do feel better.

It’s been over six months since I cut my hair into a ragged, chin length bob. I’ve let it grow out a little since, but it would still be usually short on Naboo. I wore my black wool coat with copper buttons and my new forest boots. I had painted my nails emerald-green several days before, and they were already chipped.

I should mention that I work as a computer technician, and I bought a little house by the Ewa River seven months ago. It flooded this spring, but it wasn’t too bad, and I made out all right. I go outside with a blanket, on the nights when I can’t sleep, and listen to it move, slippery and gleaming in the dark, with its cold, laughing voice. My neighbors are from Naboo, though I’ve only ever heard of their town. But they still think I’m like them, and we’re acquaintances, if not friends. I have learned not ask whether or not I actually deserve any of this. It wouldn’t matter if I didn’t.

But I wasn’t thinking about all that then. It was quiet inside the room of my skull, and my seething mind, for once, and I thought about that. A wind pulled at my hair, and I turned away from the hills, and walked back towards the lights.

\--

It was one of the first warm, swollen-humid days when I arrived in Theed. The Queen Yarm roses had bloomed, and the air smelled like the perfume from thousands of ripe, smashed flowers. I could tell even inside the climate controlled royal hangar. The pilots, and several of the guards, came to see the returned ship. None of them even looked at me. I felt like a faded ghost as I retrieved my luggage and dragged it out with me. My hand shook, and the luggage bumped against my legs. I looked straight away, and away from the chrome ship, and the reflections of those people moving inside it.

I was a ghost, as I went through the palace towards the Queen’s quarters. The light burned right through me. Of course, they hadn’t seen me.

I still don’t know what I thought of that. I would have expected it if I were a handmaiden. But I was still dressed as an aide, in a skygrey dress, the color of the weather, I had gotten on Coruscant, even if I was hauling luggage.

Before I reached our rooms, I heard Governor Strand’s voice nearby. He spoke in an earnest but guarded way, and I knew (as I hadn’t before) what that meant. I ducked behind the statue of King Narmlé and watched from behind his muscled, moon-marble, dramatic left arm as the Queen walked into view.

Governor Strand hovered next to her on one side, and Princess Yarm was on the other. The Queen spoke then, but her voice floated away from them, and I couldn’t hear what she had said. Governor Strand nodded. Princess Yarm looked carefully blank, and the skirts of her white dress rustled with static. And just behind them, just behind the Queen, were four handmaidens:

They wore dark blue, midnight blue, dresses with trailing sleeves that had to be new. I could just make out the glitter in the embroidery. They moved in formation, and I couldn’t even hear their heels click on the clean, mirror-polished floor. Their hoods were small and practical, for once, but they were looking away from me. They didn’t look like anyone I could have ever known. Then one of them turned.

Esteé turned, just enough so I could see her face. She walked in the same silent, easy fashion as the others, and for that instant, before she looked back, her eyes were watchful, but not suspiciously so. She didn’t look as though anything bad, anything she could only wish to forget, had ever happened to her.

“Why is she there?” I thought and said, though quietly enough that it was only to myself. I dropped the luggage handle and hunched over. 

_No_ , I said, over the noise inside my head. _No she shouldn’t be_.

They were gone, and I came back out, my heart beating and throbbing like a small, trapped mouse. I don’t remember reaching the royal wing, or opening the main suite doors, or reaching our private hallway. I knew which one of the doors was mine, but it was no longer familiar. Once I was inside, it smelled rain-clean and cool, and it smelled strange, like another woman, and her faint sweat-smell. I sat my luggage down, and stood there in the middle of the floor, looking around.

There was a midnight blue dress arranged on the (small, stiffly made) bed. It slipped and spilled over my arms when I picked it up. The glitter on the sleeves turned out to be tiny starstones set in the twisted embroidered lotuses. I set it back down, and got out of the grey, raincloud dress. I had paid for it, and it was still mine, even if it would stay hidden and dusty in the back of my wardrobe. I moved my arms up and pulled out the pins in my hair and tugged it loose again.

And then I stood there. I looked out the window at the bright, warm gardens, and then back at the bed. I pulled the waist of my petticoat down my hips with my thumb, and then stopped. I knew, and believed, what I had to do, but that wasn’t enough for me to care. I pulled my petticoat back up, pushed the dress to the bottom of the bed, and lay down underneath the sheet of sunlight.

Oh, I did feel guilty—but only for the first minute. I straightened my legs out and closed my eyes, and let the voice inside my head float around.

When someone knocked at the door several hours later, I was wearing the midnight dress, and had arranged my hair into one of our common styles. I had left the hood down, and I still felt the fingertip-touch of it against my back as I went to the door. Caité and Aimeé were there. The Queen must not have needed them. They had their hoods down, and Caité’s fragile blonde hair glowed in the sunlight.

“We heard you were back,” she said.

“That didn’t take long,” I said, and stepped aside (though only after a long, awkward second) so they could come in. Caité had her right hand curled around a small, dark box. I sat down in the old green silk armchair I had brought to this room, and they perched on the bed. Caité had her hands, with the little box inside, in her lap.

Caité leaned forward and held the box out to me. I must have looked surprised as I took it, because she said: “It’s for your birthday. I was going to leave it with the new frock, but then I heard you were arriving in only an hour, so—”

“It was your birthday recently, wasn’t it?” Aimeé said. She had an almost perfect memory of details and dates, so I knew she didn’t need me to answer.

“It was.” Since they were watching, I opened the box. It had an old style rosebud latch, the sort I had only seen once before, and in a museum. They must have gotten together to buy it; Caité couldn’t have paid for it herself. I took out the small oldblood ruby art necklace that was curled inside. I still have it, but since I don’t tend to wear jewelry, I keep the box hidden in a drawer among my underthings. Then I let it slide open in my hand, before I set it back inside the box and closed the lid.

“I don’t know when I’ll have the chance to wear it,” I said. I blinked, and the room shook out of place, but I wasn’t about to cry. “But, um, thank you.”

“How are you, Brisaé?” Caité said, finally daring to ask the question she must have had since she stood outside my door and knocked.

“I’ve been better,” I said, still looking down at the box in my lap. It was the only thing, of all that I thought of, that I could actually say.

“Yes, I would suppose so,” she said.

“You can have the next two days free if you want,” Aimeé said. “The Queen wanted to tell you herself, but certain matters got in the way.”

I think I nodded. Caité said: “We understand if you want to be alone for a while. But we were thinking of playing a puzzle game--”

“That’s a good idea.” I set the box down on my vanity, and smoothed out the sleepy wrinkles in the bedspread before we left.

I wouldn’t see the Queen, and Sorsché and Esteé, until that evening. The Queen seemed melancholy, her makeup faded into pale ghost skin, but she only smiled when she saw me. After all, she knew the same rules I did. I was only able to talk to her for a few minutes, while Sorsché and Caité helped her into the silver moonlight dress she would wear to the reception at the theatre for a new, _terribly important_ , work by a major Theed playwright. Esteé was away on an errand.

While Sorsché worked away at her hair, the Queen told me she had her own birthday present for me. She had decided on a gift cheque, which had already been deposited into my bank account. I would know soon enough that she had another reason for doing that—but that night, I just accepted what she told me. Caité had gone to fetch one of her long, horsetail hairpieces, and the Queen’s own hair had fallen in a long, shadow-spill over her shoulders and back.

“I didn’t know what you would want.” She sounded as though she wanted to please me, to impress me, and thought (as though we had met at college, where I was the older, higher class girl) she might not. “So this way, you can decide for yourself.”

“So long as it’s legal, of course,” Sorsché said behind the Queen’s hair.

I had to make myself smile, but it was getting easier. I stayed back in the doorway, in one of the dresses I had worn on Coruscant. “Have fun at the play.”

“We will try.” She turned the Queen’s chair towards the mirror. “But it sounds as though it might actually be worse than ‘Song of Naboo.’”

“I doubt that’s even possible,” said the Queen.

We were in private, so she didn’t have to defend it. You know (and I’m the only one reading this, so I do know): the poem written by a poet with a forgotten, humble name over three thousand years ago, and the dullest, most tiresome, patriotic work ever forced upon Naboo schoolchildren. I never did see the play, but _important_ as it may have been, the Queen was most likely right. I doubt it was that bad.

After they left, I went back to my room, and found my luggage had been taken care of. The dresses—all of them, the black one I wore the night I met the night I met the Inquisitor at the opera, the purple one, the rainstorm one—were in my wardrobe. The palace servants never came into our rooms, so I knew they couldn’t have done it. Caité thought, when I told her, it might have been Esteé. But I never would find out for certain.

\--

I returned to my role as a handmaiden as though I had never left. There wasn’t a single awkward, confused moment, as I had thought there might be when I had considered it during my trip home. I found it easy, and even relaxing, to follow the Queen, and stand, hidden inside the shadow of my hood, behind her chair. I didn’t even mind the way I would have before when I needed to relieve myself, or I had slight, gnawing-sore menstrual cramps, during one of the long, dull council sessions. No one looked at me, and waited for me to tell them my opinions on a political issue. I watched them, as I watched the Queen, but they couldn’t see me. They hardly even knew I was there.

It did turn out that Naboo politics—the ones I had been taught in school to think of as admirable, even noble—were as ridiculous and meaningless as those on Coruscant. During my first day back on duty, I noticed that they talked about freedom, about _democracy_ , as though they had never thought about what the words meant. And after that, their voices just descended into a constant, bird scream babble.

“Blah, blah, blah,” Governor Strand would say, with a suddenly foolish and sniveling smile, as though the Queen were his headmistress.

“Blah blah blah blah blah,” said Lord Airen. The Minister of Economics, and another pathetic old man.

“Blah, blah,” the Queen would say in reply.

“Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah,” Lady Qade would say. She was an old woman who had tried to be a viol player, and when she failed, became a politician instead.

I learned later that the day I arrived was the same day the Queen informed several minor governmental offices that they would need to change their wording and become, officially, part of the Empire. Royce Neuvil, the head of the public grounds department, had not taken this well. He had always been a relentless, yet thoughtless, Republic loyalist. I had seen him several times before: a small, pale man with fading, wood-brown hair, who spoke in a fawning, passive voice. I can imagine how Governor Strand had tried to reason with him, but he had directed his attention only at the Queen.

How he sounded when he told her (and Caité would tell me, when we were working in the wardrobe): _Amidala would be ashamed of you_.

“The Queen is only trying to save his arse,” Caité said, with a shrug of her voice. “Good thing too, since he’s not going to bother.”

I had seen the signs for myself the day after I arrived, when I left the palace and wandered through the hot perfume air. If I hadn’t know the wording was altered, and looked for it, I doubt I would have noticed. The signs looked as they always had, and I’m sure that was what most people saw. I was standing only inches away from the one at the Royal Museum when a woman on her way in gave me a quick smile; she smiled at me, I would realize later, as though I were a tourist.

I didn’t manage to smile back before she was gone. I went back to the street, and wandered towards a nearby park with a teashop that sold this bright, emerald-green fruit drink. The pavement had been smashed with the insides of overripe Jafan cherries.

“Do you think it will be enough, Brisaé?” Aimeé said.

They were both looking at me, and I could only say, even though it wasn’t entirely the truth: “I don’t know.”

I have wondered more than a few times if they thought the same as I did. That it was little enough, and far too late. That the Queen should have had those signs changed three years before—and then, none of what I’ve written here would have happened. But we weren’t able to discuss it further. The door opened off in the bedroom, and Sorsché’s footsteps came towards us, and we knew the Queen needed us again.

\--

A fortnight later, I had my first free afternoon. I could have left Theed to visit my parents, or gone to the University and met with my younger sister, Lotté, but I decided to wander the city alone and without aim. I took an airbus to the arts district—I did have one aim, and that was to avoid politicians, and those who emulated them. The weather was pleasantly, perfectly warm, and it was crowded in the shops and the public gardens. The bushes there were full of large, swollen white flowers. I walked along one of the paths under the dark, thin, cool shadows from the trees.

I didn’t see anyone I recognized. Or anyone—a girl I had known in school, or a friend of my mother’s—who I have to stop and speak with. I didn’t see an attractive man, with cold, space-dark eyes, I would want to watch, and even know. The air underneath the trees brushed against me in a swishing, silk-soft breeze.

I had learned on Coruscant what other people, other _beings_ , thought of Naboo. It (or really just a frozen holopicture of Theed) was the beautiful, pure, clean equivalent of Amidala’s body. I would never have written that at the time, but now that I have, I know it has always been true. But for me Theed, and the town I grew up in, were just home. I can only suppose it would be different for me now. But I had been to that part of the city numerous times my last year of school, and I knew what I would see.

But then I would see an animal, a small, sleek fierce whispercat a woman was walking on a lead, and all I could think of, before I could stop, was how someone else might see that same whispercat and wish to harm it. To beat it, to break its teeth, force dry soap into its mouth, twist its legs, _torture_ it. Or I would see a girl with hopeful, political eyes, and know how someone, probably a man, would look and only see her as meat.

I didn’t want to see that, but I still did. And since I can be honest here: I still do. It doesn’t help that I know all of those things have, and will, happen.

I can only try to shake it away when it happens, and when it becomes too bad, I have to say, and whisper, to myself: _Nononononono_.

That day, I turned down a smaller, rough, dirt trail and followed down through the trees to Duck Creek, one of the small ones that twists and churns into the river. The grass slapped against my legs, and the creek’s voice wept closer and louder as I walked. There was a small wooden viewing bench, but I went past it and straight to the creek bank. I squatted and looked into the churning water. I could see the polished smooth rocks on the creek floor, and a few tiny, flickering minnows.

I was close enough to reach in and gave the water a splash. It was swallow and, despite the warmth of the day, still cool. I wiped it on my face. It tasted like melted ice. I dropped down onto my knees, in the soft grass and tough dirt, and stayed there.

I was leaving when I felt the first, pinprick raindrops on my arm. The sky had filled with swollen grey clouds. The heat had snapped. When I got off the airbus, it was raining in heavy, pounding sheets, and I ran through it to the garden entrance. I ran fast enough so I didn’t have to think, and my hair was only damp when I got inside.

The Queen’s quarters were so quiet I could hear the faint hoof beats of the rain on the roof. She would have been meeting with the palace housekeepers for the monthly financial review. She only needed Aimeé with her for those. I was on my way back to my room when I heard a door open, a gentle (and I think now, cautious) click, like a datapad closing, and I turned to see Esteé slip out of the wardrobe.

We looked at each other. While I might not have known Esteé well, I would have said that I liked her—and I’ve no doubt she would have said the same of me. I still think, though, that had she lived, we wouldn’t have known each other for much longer.

She shifted the dark heap of a dress she was holding against her chest, and her voice surprised me when she said: “Did you have a good time in town?”

“Yes,” I said, though I would have told her the same thing if I had spent the entire time in my wardrobe with the white static inside my head.

“I’m just glad it’s raining,” she said, and we both looked at the window in the hallway. The rain was crashing against the glass, but it would only last for a few more minutes, and then the air would be a thick, damp, smothering silk blanket.

“The heat can be a little much.” I can’t be certain that was what I actually said; I just know it was something like it, that I didn’t think or care much about.

She gave a short, stiff nod. “Well, I should be going.”

But she didn’t leave. And before I could, her voice burst out like a blaster shot: “It wasn’t that bad. It wasn’t anything. I know that. So why do I feel like they killed me?” 

When I didn’t answer, she looked straight at me. “You know what I mean. None of the others have to, but you do.”

“I do,” I said. My right hand had curled into a fist, and I had to consciously relax it enough to unfold my fingers. I knew (or yes, perhaps I only thought I did) she would never find the nerve to say that much again, so I had to speak now. I looked at the window out of what I hoped she saw as discretion. And: “I don’t know, Esteé. I don’t think I ever will. I’m afraid that’s the only answer I have.”

I still have bad moments, and the worst are when I hear--so suddenly I don’t know the reason—the Agent’s voice inside my head, so close I can remember his moist breath. I can’t even lie and say that it got better. It just faded until I could bear it.

I didn’t watch Esteé walk away, though I heard her footsteps on the marble floor as she went back into the Queen’s bedroom.

\--

The Queen was free that night, for the first time in weeks. I can still picture her as she looked when I stopped by her sitting room: she had her hair in two long, plain braids, the way she must have worn it the few years she was a little girl, and she had cleaned off her white face paint. She sat on the couch, a small purple candle flickering the small tongue of its flame near the window, reading through a huge book. It looked as though it had to be several thousand years old. She looked intent, and I wasn’t sure if I should come in. Then she turned the page over, and looked up.

I could say that was one of the only times I really, and truly, saw her face. She smiled, without thinking about it, and set the book down. She had her skirts in a heap around her knees, just over the tops of her stockings.

“I didn’t mean to disturb you, Your Highness,” I said.

“You didn’t,” she said. The candle flame shivered. It was one of the cheap, scented things the Queen was fond of. “Come sit down for a while. I’m sure we are quite safe, at least for the moment, so you can relax.”

I sat down on the chair opposite her, and perhaps because I wasn’t on duty, and I had changed out of my cloak, I relaxed enough to fold my legs up under my skirts. “You’re right, Your Highness. I’ll let the guards handle things this once.”

She smiled at that, like a bird flashing into flight. “I haven’t been able to talk to you for a while, Brisaé. And I am sorry about that.”

“I suppose it has been a while,” I said. I could have mentioned how busy she had been with the constant meetings, and the recent name changes. She had had another, private, meeting with several department heads that morning. And—the one thing I couldn’t admit to knowing— _the Jedi_. But I didn’t see the need to go into what she already knew, and what I didn’t have to think about.

“I know this isn’t my concern, but--” The Queen paused as she looked down at her hands, and decided what to say. Her braids hung over her thin, dress hanger shoulders. “What happened with that man you were seeing on Coruscant?”

“That’s all over,” I said, the same thing I had told Caité when she had asked during our puzzle game my first day back. The Queen nodded.

“I’ve heard it happens that way.” Then she gave a quick, mocking laugh I had never heard from her, and would not have expected. “Of course, I don’t know much about that sort of thing. I’ve never really had the chance to find out. So, no, I can’t tell you that it was for the best. But I do hope that it was.”

“Do you want to find out?” I said.

“I haven’t thought about it much.” The Queen’s voice floated off, and I wondered what she was thinking. “I probably just don’t know how. But yes, I do want to have a few lovers, and get married, and have a family of some sort, eventually—”

She looked back at me. “And that reminds me of something I need to tell you. You know the elections will be announced next month.”

After I nodded, she said: “I’ve decided not to run for re-election.”

“Does anyone else know?” I said.

“Right now, only you. I wanted to tell someone I knew would understand first. But they will have to know, and soon. I know, I know, Strand will tell me I would be re-elected in an easy majority. And he would most likely be right. But while I may have been the ruler Naboo wanted, I’m not the one they need. And I never have been.”

I could have lied to her, but I didn’t see the point. “I suppose Princess Yarm will want to have a go, once she knows she won’t be competing with you.”

“I would not be surprised,” Apailana—Ashmé—said. “But I’ll only have my one vote in the matter, the same as you. So. When this is all over, and I’m a citizen— Do you think we’ll be able to meet again?”

I didn’t have an answer to that, and neither did she. We didn’t know what happened to handmaidens, and what they did, when their queen left office. The Queens leave history for ordinary, anonymous lives, until they appear again as old women at their public funerals. I can just remember seeing the former Queen Silviana’s funeral barge when I was six. But no one sees the handmaidens, and so no one knows. I still don’t know anything about Amidala’s handmaidens. I never even saw them, unless they were the maidens escorting her coffin at the funeral. When Amidala came to Theed during the Clone Wars, she only brought a protocol droid with her.

I had met one of Jamillia’s handmaidens the day after the election. Her name was Megira, and we hadn’t spoken long enough for me to know her.

Finally I said: “Well, I suppose we’re going to find out.”

“I think we will,” the Queen said. She stretched her legs out, and her skirts swished back into place. She sent for some tea and cakes, and we didn’t discuss the matter of the upcoming election further. That would have to happen soon enough.

\--

While Sorsché came in with a tray of little cream cakes, Darth Vader’s command ship would have returned to Coruscanti orbit. He had just managed a situation on Platooine, a world I only know as a name in the galactic dictionary. I heard several years after it ended that their warlord-king had committed suicide by cutting his throat with a shard from his wife’s mirror. Lord Vader would have gone down to the surface to meet with his only master, the Emperor. And this time, finally, the Emperor would speak with him about a matter that concerned his own homeworld. He no longer wished to humor, or ignore, the rumors that there were Jedi in Theed.

Two days later, while the Queen told the other four handmaidens about her decision to leave office, a squad from Darth Vader’s personal legion, the 501st, left the night skies of Coruscant for Naboo.

It was already over, but we didn’t know that yet. Caité and Sorsché and Aimeé weren’t surprised—I think Aimeé had expected as much. But Esteé blinked in a rapid, butterfly-winged flurry, before she looked down at her hands.

“What are you going to do, Your Highness?” she asked. I can only guess what she and the Queen might have discussed later when they were alone.

“I hope it will be a grand adventure,” the Queen said.

That night, the Queen walked through the shadow-soft hallways of the palace, dressed in one of our dark winter cloaks, and into a wing no one else used, to see two men who should not have been there. One of them still carried a wand at his waist that could burst out a long, electric-light sword.

Did she tell them: _Stay as long as you need to_.

Or—even as, trillions of miles of vacuum away, the end moved towards her—did she agree when they said: _We’re grateful, Your Highness. But we need to move on_.

There isn’t much to write about the next, last, week. I will only say that we returned to our duties that morning, the way we had for years. I found the Queen’s personal datapad, and Caité and Esteé went and stood by the doors. Sorsché went to fetch the Queen’s first gown of the day, and Aimeé straightened up the vanity. Their dresses were ink-dark blurs (as Uma and Oppelia had once been) moving inside the mirror.

\--

Captain Bibble came into the throne room towards the end of the Queen’s afternoon meeting with Governor Strand. I don’t think either of them noticed he was there: he stood back in the thin, faded sunlight from the large windows while they (or rather, Governor Strand) talked. He seemed as composed, as—I can’t think of a better word— _amiable_ as he always did. The guards stayed in their positions. I did look over at him from my chair, and he gave a slight nod in my direction before he turned to the window. I would wonder later he thought, and feared, he might see out there.

I haven’t mentioned Captain Bibble much in this narrative, and now that I should change that, I’m not sure how. He was one of the few people who saw us, and we spent hours, and days, training with him—but I didn’t know that much about him.

His first name was Janus. He had red hair and that delicate, sand-freckled skin. I knew (though only because I heard things in passing, not because he told us) that he was married, with one, or it may have been two, small children. He wasn’t as single-minded as Moff Panaka had been when he had his position. I am still glad he never knew about my relationship with the Inquisitor. I have more than an idea what he would have said.

The Queen had just stood, and Governor Strand was giving her a stooped, hovering bow. Their meeting was over. I want to say it was the Queen, but it was the Governor who saw him and said: “What is it, Captain?”

Caité looked over from her chair on the other side of the throne, and twitched her eyebrows at me. I couldn’t return the gesture, but I only had to look back. Aimeé and Sorsché were in position behind the Queen. I could only see the sides of their hoods. Esteé would have been back in the Queen’s quarters, amongst the dresses in her wardrobe.

“Milord. Your Highness,” said Captain Bibble. “I’ve just received word that an Imperial ship is in Theed orbit--”

“Only one ship?” Governor Strand said.

If this were a proper story, the Queen would have spoken first, the way a heroine should. But I’m going to write about what actually happened, not what would been best in story, where the rules work. She stepped back and let him take the lead. Aimeé and Sorsché stayed where they were.

“Yes, Milord. Flight control started tracking it only an hour ago. It’s one of their stealth crafts, which means they want us to know they’re here. And they wanted us to find out that they’ve sent a ground party.”

“Do you know where they’ve landed?” the Queen said.

“I’m sorry, Your Highness,” Captain Bibble said. “We lost track of their shuttle only seconds after it left the ship. But I think we all know they’re here, and why.”

Yes, I knew. It was still warm outside the window, and the floor was covered with cloak-fluttering shadows from the courtyard trees, but I was suddenly cold and hard, as though I were going to burst, like an arrow, from my chair, and my body. I’m sure the others felt the same. Aimeé’s cloak made a slight whispershift as she moved closer to the Queen. But when I saw her face, she had made it into a empty, doll-porcelain mask. I had to do the same. I had to relax, and I tried, as Captain Bibble said: “—of my men will see you arrive home safely, Milord.”

The ship stayed hanging in orbit, black against the black of space, while the shuttle flew across the sky. The few advisors who were still at their offices had already left the palace with several guards, several _nice young men_ —and it would turn out, lucky ones as well. The men in the shuttle would have each had, in their heads, the map they had planned out of their attack. They were ready to do what they had been trained for.

After Governor Strand was gone—and if he protested, I can’t remember it—and the doors closed behind him, the Queen said: “What are your plans, Captain?”

Her voice was small, fading into an echo, in the throne room. Caité and I joined Aimeé and Sorsché. Her back, I could see then, was clenched into a wooden door.

“We need to get you to a safe place,” he said. “We have to be fast, but not so fast they know we’re on the run. And—I think we should implement protocol.”

I don’t have to explain what that meant. “No,” the Queen said. “Whatever happens, I can face my own fate.”

“Your Highness,” said Captain Bibble. “I admire your principles, but now is not the time. I want you alive, not a martyr for democracy.”

“I want the same thing,” she said. “And though the Emperor only knows all the political secrets we do, they would never think to look for me amongst my handmaidens.” She paused, and her sharp, bright smile faded. “I understand, Captain. I do. But I think we need to go with something else. Something new.”

She knew she had our support. We had only to gather close around her, close enough we didn’t have to touch her for her to feel safe. I hardly heard Captain Bibble as he turned away to talk on his comm. His voice was only a creek-rush of words.

\--

We all wore brown dresses, the soft, dull brown of lake sparrow feathers, with short skirts and lighter, matching leggings, and the bright black boots we had kept in our wardrobes since our last training session. I remember the new, soap smell of that dress as I hurried into it. We were in the Queen’s bedroom, and I could see the blur of the others, my pale legs, and the dress I had just worn lying on the floor. Then I sat down to pull the tall, shining boots on. None of us spoke, even when we did each other’s hair up into matching knots. I did Aimeé’s hair, and I think Caité did mine.

And I do mean all of us. The Queen turned in her brown dress, her hair hanging down her back, so Esteé could do it up. She had washed off the royal white paint first, only minutes before, and her face was still damp.

There was a tree branch tapping at the door, and Captain Bibble came in with his guards. All of them had their glossy, insect-skinned blasters out. “I still think you’re overestimating them, Your Highness,” he said.

“Perhaps,” the Queen said. “But it’s better than the alternative.”

I was also holding my blaster, clenched tight in my fist. I can almost remember how it felt—how sleek and warm and bony-hard.

“True,” the Captain said, with a quick, grim, approving nod. One of the guards moved over to the window, though I could have told him that we had already checked, and the courtyards were empty—or at least, they appeared to be. The other guards, young men I wouldn’t have recognized without their uniforms, did look and see us. Aimeé and Sorsché looked back. I didn’t know how.

“All clear, sir,” the guard said. He had thick eyebrows and sallow skin, and a mild schoolboy voice. “We’d better move out now.”

We were moving down the hallway in a rainstorm of footsteps when I heard a comm. buzz, and the Captain’s dream-whisper voice as he answered. He had to stop, and I waited, we all waited, for him to give us our positions. The glass of the windows suddenly seemed too thin, as though the sky, and the light, could break through them.

He snapped his comm. shut, and: “The palace has been infiltrated. They’ve entered one of the older wings. Only a few men, but that’s still enough.”

“That doesn’t make any sense, sir,” said one of the guards. “They’re only going to find storage rooms over there.”

The Captain was looking right at the Queen. “Maybe it does.”

I could sense it among the others, both the guards and the handmaidens, perhaps because I could feel the words inside my own mouth: _It’s the Jedi_.

It was Caité who actually said it: “They’re looking for the Jedi. The Jedi they already knew were here. Aren’t they, Your Highness.”

The Queen had to look away before she said, finally, “Yes.”

“If they’re still here, they can take care of themselves,” the Captain said--or if this were in a holonovel, _snapped out_. He moved on, and we hurried with him. “We’re going to have our own problems soon enough.”

We split into two groups just outside the throne room doors: Captain Bibble went towards the main staircase with half of the guards and Aimeé and Sorsché and Esteé; the rest of us went down one of the back staircases the servants used. We came out into the courtyard, and I still remembered how the sun glowed behind the clouds, and how the breeze smelled damp and bright from the river. We moved into our places around the arch pillars, and after we saw the mirror-flash from Captain Bibble, Sorsché gave us the gesture to move on. She had always been the best shot, so the Queen had her go first.

We followed her, and that was when the stormtroopers came out in their snowblind armor. I supposed, later, they had come from the crowded, bristling trees in the gardens. I didn’t have the time to think before they were shooting, and I was holding my blaster and returning their fire. The air was clouded with smoke. A man’s tin can voice shrieked out at one point, but I couldn’t stop long enough to see him. Then I was standing just behind one of the archways. Caité and the Queen were with me, and Sorsché and guards were only feet away. When it was quiet, I looked out into the courtyard, and then back at the Queen. She nodded at Sorsché.

The smoke was fading as we moved to our next position. One of the guards had been wounded, and I had seen several of the stormtroopers fall. I doubt I was responsible, though I can’t know that for certain. The stone wall pressed against my back and arse. The wounded guard smelled like burnt cloth. Once again, we waited, and when it stayed quiet, we moved out, silently, our breaths held.

Aimeé and one of the guards ran over to meet us. I noticed, even at the time, that they moved side by side as though they had trained together. That easily. I must have seen him before, but I didn’t recognize him. “Are you all right, Your Highness?” she said. She was so close I could feel the heat glowing off her skin.

“Yes,” Caité said, as we had planned. She sounded as though her voice came from a music box, but her eyes were damp and nightmare-bruised.

“The Captain thinks we should make for the river,” said the guard. “They’ve closed off the entire hangar area.”

There was a sudden, nearby fireworks burst of blaster fire. Sorsché turned and let off several shots of hers, and then there was only the echo left.

We moved, and the others joined in with us. The guards formed a circle around us as we walked. And we stayed close to Esteé—and to the girl who looked most like her. The Queen. I can only wonder now just how obvious it was. The wounded guard clutched his arm over his chest and kept walking, though I will never know how. Sorsché wiped at her eyes with her free hand. The Queen only looked ahead. Her eyes were blank, and she shook the loose, itching strands of her hair out of her face. We didn’t get far, less than one hundred more yards, before it happened.

I didn’t hear the stormtroopers, or see where they came from. They were just there, and the air was burst with loud, ruby-bright blaster shots.

I don’t know when I looked up, my blaster shaking in my numbed hand, and saw Caité jerk backwards, and fall against the wall. She hadn’t had time to scream. There was a small hole burnt in her neck from the blaster bolt she had never seen.

And: _Maybe they don’t care which one of us is the Queen_ , I thought, as though I were reading it from a datapad. _Maybe they’re just going to kill us all_.

The sniper only paused a few seconds before he fired again. I don’t know what happened with that shot, but it was one of the stormtroopers who shot the guards in front of us before they could even fire. They shot Aimeé as she shoved the Queen away. The Queen stumbled, and I heard her little, startled grunt as she caught her balance.

After that, I couldn’t see or think well enough to remember much. It’s blurry now, as though I’m trying to wake up from a dream.

The Queen and I ran, and she fired several shots into the blaster smoke mist. I must have fired too, though I can’t remember lifting my blaster.

One of the guards’ voices shot out in a slammed, falling scream.

One of the stormtroopers fell down, and then Esteé was with us, her eyes black with pupil, and her hair a sloppy, tangled mess.

I never saw the stormtrooper who killed her, though I did see her fall back, hard and fast, before she hit the ground. She was shot at least three times. The Queen reached down and brushed her forehead, but I yanked her away. _No_ , I said, as Captain Bibble would have wanted me to. _We haven’t time_.

And: I was there when the sniper looked down on us and fired, and this time, he shot the Queen. Her eyes widened, and she clutched at her chest. Then I heard the breaking lute string ping, even if only inside my head, as he shot her the second time, the last time, and made the head shot.

That time, she dropped down to her knees. And I sat down next to her, though I knew I couldn’t do anything. The blaster fire continued to snap, and screech, around us. She smiled, and silky-red blood drooled down her chin. “Yes,” she said, as she fell over next to one of the guards, the one who still looked like a schoolboy. “ _Yes_.”

My hair was in my face, and in my mouth as I panted, as I crawled behind them towards the wall under one of the courtyard arches. I pushed myself close against it, and--tired of having to see--clenched my eyes shut. My spit tasted like old metal coins. I’ll never know how long it was before the blaster fire stopped, and the echoes faded off. I waited, but it was silent, and there was only a faint, bonfire smell left. It was over, and somehow, though it didn’t seem possible, I was still alive.

After several minutes of that, I slid to my feet and moved, in slow, creeping inches, along the wall until I could look out into the courtyard. The stormtroopers were gone. I don’t have to write here what I did see out there. I’m hardly going to forget. I bumped something soft with my foot, but I didn’t—I couldn’t—look down. I was stiff and tired, so tired, I had lean back against the wall. My stomach made a small, bubble-popped growl, and I cold smell my oil-warm sweat, and my own skin.

Then I heard the click-click of footsteps, and I ducked back down into a crouch. When I looked out again, I saw the stormtroopers, their armor smudged grey with blaster smoke, marching a row of guards through with their hands behind their heads. Captain Bibble wasn’t amongst them, and I knew that meant he was dead. One of the troopers left to meet up with a commanding officer. I heard his mechanical-hiss voice as he said: “We took out the Queen. I saw it happen myself. It’s done, sir.”

They couldn’t see me. The officer tilted his helmet, and his black sugarfly eye lenses actually looked thoughtful. “And the handmaidens?”

“None survived,” the stormtrooper’s voice said.

Once I was certain they were gone, I came out from behind the wall. The sky was turning inkstained blue with evening. I looked down at the blaster I was still holding, and dropped it with a coin tossed clatter to the ground. I haven’t touched a blaster since then, and I hope I never will.

Then I ran. My legs were shivering and numb, and I stumbled a few times, but I managed to keep going. I didn’t want to see them, but I still did, if only in lurching flashes. Several guards had fallen together in a sprawled, bedtime heap. I saw Esteé. And Caité, her hands still around her throat. I saw Sorsché, the only one I could hope was still alive, lying on her side, her eyes open and staring. I thought, in a distant, whispering voice, that if I looked into them, I would see my reflection.

I was breathing with my mouth open, and _There is no ignorance_ , my footsteps pounded, _there is only knowledge_.

I don’t know why I thought that as I ran out of the courtyard, and down the steps past the edge of the gardens, towards the Elsinoré Courtyard on the river terrace.

But I heard it again and again in the same drumbeat chant. I don’t believe what the Jedi did, what the girl could only pretend she didn’t, but it helped.

_There is no ignorance_ \-- My back clenched as I thought I heard a speeder whine, though it was probably only a normal, and ignorant, civilian.

_There is no death_ , she told me again, her voice faded into a memory. I could hear the pounding, heaving water of the falls. _No death. Only the force_.

\--

Lord Vader was not with his men that day. I’m sure if he had been, I would have seen him, and I think I would remember that. He might have stayed in the control room in the ship floating miles overhead in orbit. Or perhaps he never left his flagship. During my last days there, I heard from Lotté that—supposedly—he couldn’t bear to set foot on Naboo. That he might have originally been from Theed. I suppose that is possible, since no one knows otherwise. And people were remembering that old, tired rumor that he had visited Amidala’s crypt one night a month after she died. The groundskeeper had claimed he had one glimpse of his long, floating black cloak, and heard his slow, mechanical breathing, before he was gone.

I think it is far more likely that Lord Vader simply felt the mission was beneath him. His men could handle any resistance without him.

And I have never believed that he came in secret, and in the dark, to visit Amidala in her grave. He may be from Naboo, but he would have no reason to love her.

Moff Panaka made an official statement only moments after he arrived in Theed from Chommell Minor. I watched it on the holonet, but I can’t remember most of what he said. Only that he was in the throne room at the palace, and:

_Rest assured that I am looking into this matter_ , he said. As though he were telling a late night story he knew the ending to.

While I sat on the sopha in the upstairs parlour at my parents’ house. The curtains were closed, and the room was lit with dark, false, theatre light. The door was just left open a few inches, and Bale and Quintana had gone downstairs to get me, to get us, something to eat. My mother had released their housekeeper for the week to weep over Apailana. And so she wouldn’t see me, and know I was still alive.

That would be the final mystery I have: why I’m alive now, to write what I know as this story. I can still hear what that stormtrooper said. When I had the time to think about it, I realized what it might have actually meant. They could have looked, and it would have taken them only a minute to find me. They didn’t. They didn’t, and perhaps that was because they had orders specifically not to.

No, I will never find out for certain if the Inquisitor contacted the commanding officer and told him they were to spare my life. But I’ve thought about it—more than I care to admit—and I can’t believe in another reason. He would have known of their mission, and they wouldn’t have cared enough to ask for his reasons, even if they could have. I can imagine how he stood by his desk, his reflection in the window behind him, as he contacted the commanding officer through his private number. But I can’t hear his voice, or know what he said to get what he wanted.

One could say he didn’t do me a favor. I have—especially during the times I woke up, sweaty and locked inside my body, when I was disgusted just to exist, when I could hardly bear to get up and relieve myself. But I know he didn’t have any reasons to get back at me. No, he would have done it from what he would have thought of as affection.

\--

My sister Salleria came to the door at my parents’ house. I still remember how I stood next to the small bristling shrub by the porch and watched it open. I had found a dark cloak in the hangar to wear over my battle dress, and I had lowered the big, loose hood. My legs were so tired I could barely feel them. Salleria looked at me for a long, staring moment. She was fifteen then, and a student at the local art academy. She had dyed her hair, which was lighter than mine, with mauve streaks, and her fingernails were dirty with charcoal. She was in her stocking feet.

Finally, after what must have only been a few seconds, I said: “Hello, Salleria. Aren’t you going to let me in?”

She stepped aside, and I went past her into the entryway. It looked the same as my memories, with the gameboard floor and the staircase in the shadows, but it smelled like a place I had never been to before.  
Salleria closed the door, and: “We just got a call an hour ago. From the Governor’s office. They said you were dead.”

“Oh.” I felt the familiar, gnawing pain stretch across my upper back, and I leaned against the wall. I don’t think there was anything else I could have said.

“Mum!” Salleria called, though her voice hesitated. “It’s _Catriona_.”

Of course, that was the name they still used for me, even after I became a handmaiden, and I was relieved. I might have lived, but Brisaé had died. And yes, I knew I couldn’t be Catriona Melior, Anné Melior’s daughter, for much longer.

They all came to see me. My mother rushed, and flew, down from her study on the second storey. Quintana and Bale were right behind her. She paused on the last step, and her eyes turned wide and dark, and her hand tightened on the banister. Quintana and Bale stood on the step above her and watched me. They had believed, only minutes before, that I was dead, and there I was. Only I looked like a flicking ghost reflection.

My mother stepped down into the entryway. My eyes were burning-raw, and I felt it when I blinked. “The Governor’s office made a mistake.”

“And I’m so glad,” and my mother paused to exhale, “they did.”

She put her arms around me, and slowly, as though I were going to burst into a mess of dingy black feathers, hugged me. I’ve never liked a great deal of physical affection (and yes, that was a problem with another lover I won’t go on about), but I shut my eyes, and let her. I was too tired to care. I could feel Salleria and Bale just behind us, and Quintana, the bebe, came up and pressed her face against my back.

My father came home as soon as he could. Lotté came back the next day after the University shut down for state mourning. She told us, that night in the main parlour, that Moff Panaka had made Governor Strand emergency regent, but not before the Empire put Theed, along with the surrounding area, under martial protection. Several reinforcement squads had arrived from a star destroyer near Chommell Major, and she had heard more were coming from the garrison on Eriadu.

My mother frowned, but I couldn’t feel anything. Oh, I knew what I was supposed to feel, but I couldn’t care, and I wasn’t surprised. “What about Princess Yarm?”

Lotté shrugged. She preferred abstract ideas to politics, and was taking courses in philosophy and Grizmalti religions at the University, and that was just as well. She fancied women—and didn’t hide it—and I know how that would have gone over with the masses. “I would suppose she still has her position.”

I knew I couldn’t stay there for long. My parents never said as much, but they must have known it as well. But for that short time, for less than a week, I did. I stayed in the bedroom that had always been mine, with Lotté in the next room, as though I had never left. I picked out one of my mother’s antique paper books to read. I couldn’t think about the Queen, or the other handmaidens, except in stabbing flashes, so I didn’t.

Lotté listened to a classical music holo-radio station while she worked on an essay for one of her classes. I don’t like most of those songs now, but during that week, I was glad to hear them over the white static in my head.

\--

That first night, I left the light on near my bed, and I had to take two tiny blue sleeping pills that scratched my throat as I swallowed them to get to sleep. I was afraid of that moment when my consciousness would shut off, and I would see what it’s like to be dead. I still have that problem, but not as often. The next morning, I went to my window and looked down at the street. The pavement was damp from several quick minutes of rain. My mother came into view with a woman I recognized as their neighbor. I was only wearing my knickers and a see-through chemise, so I backed away.

I could still see my mother and the neighbor. I won’t include her name, though I haven’t forgotten it. She was a matron with purple-red hair she had done up in two fat buns, and she was dressed in grey mourning. She nodded, and I watched her hand as she touched my mother’s arm.

Lotté walked across her room, and turned on the music. I heard a creak, and then the gasp of air as she opened her window. She had taken to smoking these little root-brown cigarettes, even though they made her cough. I looked back at the women.

I couldn’t hear what they were saying, but I didn’t have to. The woman was consoling my mother for her loss. Or (and I can hear the nervous birdsong of her voice as she said it) she was telling her how proud she should be that her daughter had done her duty for her Queen, and of course, the sovereignty, _the glory_ , of Naboo.

\--

Queen Apailana’s funeral procession was held on a warm evening. The air still smelled like rose perfume, and the sky was full of swollen, sunburnt clouds. It looked so much like the night of Amidala’s funeral, except this time, stormtroopers from the new garrison patrolled the crowds lining the boulevard. And the people who were there stayed silent, not with sorrow, but with nervous, paranoid fear. Their candles flicked and shivered in the occasional damp breeze off the river. I watched all of this from my place in the back with Lotté and Bale. I wore a grey wool mourning cloak, and after a while, when no one else seemed to even see me, I lowered the hood.

Governor Strand, as acting head of state, led the procession with Lyonie, the Gungan boss, and his two attendants. Moff Panaka followed them, and I will say that out of all those people, he was the only one who looked pained. He hadn’t approved of most of the Queen’s actions, but he must have been—if only reluctantly—fond of her. Princess Yarm came next, and then a tall woman with brass-dark blonde hair. I wonder if that was Kylantha, the woman who is the current queen. Senator Zevon hadn’t had enough time to make it back from Coruscant.

And then: the sleek white sled of the Queen’s coffin followed them. I wasn’t close enough to actually see her—her body—inside it. The embalmer would have made her into a beautiful, though too unnaturally beautiful, doll. Her grandmother, her mother’s mother, would have arranged the snow flowers in her spilled out hair, and dressed her in a gown made from antique lakewater silk.

Her stomach was flat and smooth; her uterus a small, clenched fist inside. I heard some of the people around us murmur over that. That was one last, obvious way Apailana wasn’t Amidala—she could only have died a virgin.

I couldn’t see her, but I could see the two handmaidens walking alongside the coffin. Only two of them, drowned in their spilled wine cloaks. They must have come from the training school, since Princess Yarm did not have handmaidens. I jerked back when I saw them, but I didn’t say anything. No one else around me had noticed, including my brother and sister, and they wouldn’t have cared if they had.

Then her coffin had moved on, and I scarcely saw the people behind it, who must have been her family. I looked down at the candle I was holding, and watched the melted wax drool and spill over the top and onto my hand. It hurt for a brief, burning moment that I almost enjoyed. I had to peel the wax off, later, like a scab.

Several days after that, I went to our house in the mountains. I spent most of my time out on the hiking trails, walking and walking until I was too tired to think, and then I took a pill to make sure I didn’t see anything while I slept. The nearest houses were still closed for the season, and I didn’t have to speak to the few people I saw.

Erised closed out my bank account, and—with my mother’s permission—transferred the funds to a new account in the town where she taught school.

Once I had the money, I started looking around the holonet, on a secured account, to find the place where I would start the rest of my life.

I boarded the transport in Oxon, a city on one of the southern continents I had never been to before. We had all thought that was best, and I let Lotté pick it out. The ship was a Kuati barge that pre-dated the Clone Wars, but I had paid enough to have my own private, if tiny, room. I had only one suitcase of clothes—my mother’s book, a datapad, this datapad in fact, and the box with the necklace Caité had given me inside them—with me. The rest of my belongings, the ones my mother had insisted on, were in the hold.

When the officer asked me to sign some papers before I boarded, I had to think for a moment about what my name should be. She gave me an irritated, and irritating, look. Finally I knew, and my hand shook as I wrote it down: _Ashmé Gaunt_.

\--

It should not be possible for a handmaiden to survive while her mistress does not. But I know, as I have for years, that it is. I don’t want to believe in fate, but if it is so, and if I had been meant to die that day, I would have. And I can’t wish that I had been struck down with a blaster shot, even during my worst days. I don’t think that Apailana, and Aimeé, and Caité, and Sorsché, and Esteé, are watching me now. I don’t believe there is anything left after death, and the end of the consciousness. They don’t exist. I don’t think that my memories, which have faded the way my dreams do, quite count.

I’ve written about them here, I suppose, so I can make this into a story that makes sense. Or at the least, I’ve tried. But I think it’s about time to stop now.

As my mother would say: _Life goes on, even if you don’t go on with it_.

I do think I have one obligation—to live the lives they didn’t get to. I may not have done the best job of it, and I know I’ve done things they wouldn’t have imagined I could, but that isn’t the point. Maybe, maybe, that is the final reason I’m still alive.

\--

There is another moon the people here call Avatha, though it is only known on the Imperial system chart as K6. It’s really only a small, grayish, leg bone asteroid that was caught in the planet’s orbit millions of years ago, and not much of a moon. I only know that because of the pictures in the official lunar studies. It orbits out beyond the other moons, so far it is only a tiny, shifting pinprick of light amongst the stars. I learned which one it was when I went to the observatory on Azure Mountain, and one of the staff members pointed it out at the end of shaking, red laser. That was the same night I saw which star was actually the system gas giant churning with hurricanes.

I don’t know who gave Avatha its name. The moons all have names from various cultures, on different worlds, but while this name sounds familiar, and similar enough to names I do know, I’ve never found out what it came from.

It might be named after a goddess people still believe in, or a woman in the astronomy union. Or they may have just liked the name.

But I do know that none of our moons have stories about them. I haven’t studied galactic mythologies since I was in school, but I know that on most worlds, if not all of them, people once looked up at their moons, and tried to explain how they worked. After the universe had all been explained, they kept them as nice, quaint fantasies.

I went outside tonight, as soon as it was dark enough for me to turn on a lamp, and looked through the sky until I saw the tiny stagelight of Avatha. The other moons are dark tonight—only Hiera is an orange, burning crescent just above the trees—so I was able to find it without their lights in the way. I stood there as the darkness turned into shadows I could see in, my travel torchlight asleep in my hand. The trees shook their leaves, and the river breathed in the background.

Most of the stories I read when I was thirteen--that came with the Grizmalti when they landed on the plains where Theed would be built, or that people made for the moons they saw at night—involve a goddess, like Shiraya with her white light skin. Or a queen, and occasionally a king, whose journeys all end happily and acceptably.

But I don’t want those stories anymore, and certainly not for this world. It’s a new world, and it should have new stories.

This one will begin with a girl. She will come from an ordinary, middle class background, and she will have lived her life until then in a grey house outside a village near the ocean. She will be sixteen, or no—I think she should be a little older, though that can always change. One evening, she will be walking alone on the beach as the moon first becomes visible in the sky. When she looks back the way she came, she will see, standing in the surf, someone who hadn’t been there before—

I don’t know what should happen next. Or how it involves the bone-moon, Avatha. I haven’t ever done this before. And I know it might take a while, perhaps years of words, before I know what the ending should be.

 

*


End file.
